WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats, divided and struggling for a path from the electoral wilderness, are constructing an agenda to align with many proposals of President-elect Donald J. Trump that put him at odds with his own party.

On infrastructure spending, child tax credits, paid maternity leave and dismantling trade agreements, Democrats are looking for ways they can work with Mr. Trump and force Republican leaders to choose between their new president and their small-government, free-market principles.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, elected Wednesday as the new Democratic minority leader, has spoken with Mr. Trump several times, and Democrats in coming weeks plan to announce populist economic and ethics initiatives they think Mr. Trump might like.

Why are Schumer and some other Northern Democrats interested in playing nice with Trump when others are raining fire and brimstone upon the President-Elect? Well, traditionally liberal Upstate New York, which was largely settled by post-Puritans from New England, went for Trump over New York’s former Senator last week:

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would win Upstate New York if it wasn’t linked to New York City and its suburbs.

With 94 percent of the vote counted in New York state, Trump is ahead by around 100,000 votes in Upstate New York.

Several counties that helped elect President Barack Obama shifted “red” this year. Donald Trump won in more than a dozen Upstate New York counties that Obama won in those elections.

Rockefeller Plaza, Albany

Last year Michael Barone suggested that Trump’s precedent was liberal Republican and big spender / big builder Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York from 1959-1973, three time candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, and VP under Gerald Ford:

I submit another as Trump’s precedent, a man on that podium in November 1964: Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller was considered an establishment Republican, but he operated entirely, as the title of Richard Norton Smith’s magisterial and compelling biography of him says, “On His Own Terms.” He was sometimes lavishly liberal (his Medicaid program spent one-quarter of national funds), sometimes harshly conservative (mandatory sentences for drug offenses). He spent enormous sums building Albany’s Capitol Mall and a state university system intended to rival California’s. He raised taxes so much that someone said he spends the people’s money as if it were his own.

Rockefeller was richer than Trump, a more gifted art-and-architecture patron, and less given to boasting. He had a much longer public career, from running FDR’s Latin American desk to being Gerald Ford’s vice president. But through all that, he was regarded by insiders as an unguided missile, not subject to institutional constraint, seeking power to do whatever he wanted. Rockefeller was elected governor when Donald Trump was twelve and served until Trump was 27 and about to make his jump to Manhattan.

Nelson Rockefeller was famously dyslexic, like his brothers conservationist and hotelier Laurence, Arkansas governor Winthrop, and Chase banker David (now 101). They all attended a progressive school funded by their father John D. Rockefeller Jr. that was dedicated to the ideas of John Dewey, which may have contributed to their lifelong difficulties in reading. In contrast, their oldest brother, John D. Rockefeller III, received a traditional education and was a fine student at Princeton. Interestingly, JDR III grew up to be a fairly quiet, cultured individual who dedicated himself to respectable philanthropy, while his semi-literate brothers were big personalities who enjoyed lots of success. There’s probably a lesson in this.

I don’t know if Trump is dyslexic but clearly reading is less important to him than conversation and television.

Back to the NYT article:

Democrats, who lost the White House and made only nominal gains in the House and Senate, face a profound decision after last week’s stunning defeat: Make common cause where they can with Mr. Trump to try to win back the white, working-class voters he took from them, or resist at every turn, trying to rally their disparate coalition in hopes that discontent with an ineffectual new president will benefit them in 2018.

Mr. Trump campaigned on some issues that Democrats have long championed and Republicans resisted: spending more on roads, bridges and rail, punishing American companies that move jobs overseas, ending a lucrative tax break for hedge fund and private equity titans, and making paid maternity leave mandatory.

Some Democrats are even co-opting Mr. Trump’s language from the campaign. “Every single person in our caucus agrees the system is rigged,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan.

Why not include The Wall in an infrastructure bill? Get The Wall passed with substantial Democratic support.

Trump seems like a response to the low inflation environment of recent years. Big spenders like LBJ and Rocky helped set off inflation in the late 1960s. Nixon’s fiddling with the economy to get re-elected in 1972 appears to have set off a lot of inflation in 1973. But nothing seems to set off CPI inflation anymore, so why not have a big spender President?

Of course, if we happen to get a lot of CPI inflation, then this will look very different.

It’s kind of like how Black Lives Matter and similar anti-law and order fads are a response to the low crime rate of recent years. We got used to the murder rate falling 3% to 5% per year, so why not cut back on law and order in the name of social justice?

But we immediately got hit with double digit inflation in the homicide rate, with much of the inflation centered in a few cities with big BLM protests like Chicago and Baltimore.

On infrastructure spending, child tax credits, paid maternity leave and dismantling trade agreements, Democrats are looking for ways they can work with Mr. Trump and force Republican leaders to choose between their new president and their small-government, free-market principles.

Isn’t that called leverage? If the opposing team wants something more than your team, doesn’t that mean you can ask for more? I’m no legislative expert, but can’t Trump slip in some immigration enforcement proposal (e-verify, money for fence/wall etc.) in return for giving the democrats what they want on infrastructure. If his first major piece of legislation includes massive infrastructure spending and e-verify, how popular do you think that will be? I would guess 80% or 90% of Americans would approve of such a bill. Based on the polling I’ve seen e-verify has like a 75% approval rating, and so does more infrastructure spending.

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The Democrats are at risk of losing a major amount of Senate seats in 2018, should Trump maintain (or likely exceed) his current popularity levels. The crazier the SJW reaction gets, the harsher the backlash will be.

A large trache of money is already availiable for a massive infrastructure program, its called telling LockMart to stuff it on the F-35 cost overruns. A failing system of public services is the true cost of our endless wars.

Democrats are looking for ways they can work with Mr. Trump and force Republican leaders to choose between their new president and their small-government, free-market principles.

Their "small government" principles didn't stop federal from doubling over the last 8 years. I think they'll choose Trump. But at least Trump may be able to play them off the Dems to get better deals.

The Democrats are at risk of losing a major amount of Senate seats in 2018, should Trump maintain (or likely exceed) his current popularity levels. The crazier the SJW reaction gets, the harsher the backlash will be.

A large trache of money is already availiable for a massive infrastructure program, its called telling LockMart to stuff it on the F-35 cost overruns. A failing system of public services is the true cost of our endless wars.

'New York, which was largely settled by post-Puritans from New England'

The Dutch and the Mayflower seem to arrive about the same time, only the Dutch do not seem to nearly starve to death nor are they constantly waring with the Indians. Note the foundational myth of Dutch settlement is paying Indians for Manhattan. The Dutch surrender on good terms to the British in 1664.

A large trache of money is already availiable for a massive infrastructure program, its called telling LockMart to stuff it on the F-35 cost overruns. A failing system of public services is the true cost of our endless wars.

Yep. Cancel the whole worthless F-35 program. You could build a lot of infrastructure with the savings. And you could build a lot of wall.

Never heard of upstate New York being Lefty. Most of NY State is pretty rural and anti-lefty. Even the city of Buffalo has a strong anti-lefty populace—you can actually run into large abortion protests there today.

Western New York was the center of the old “burned over district” from the Second Great Awakening period—where a lot of the evangelization took place and was centered. This was old left-Protestant, not modern-irreligious-psycho lefty. The religion drove politics then, not the other way around.

At least until the late 1980s, there was a famous Pentecostal preacher-training school located in Western NY, which trained preachers in the distinctive style of the screaming hellfire-and-brimstone speaking seen in some Hollywood movies. Comedian Sam Kinnison actually studied at this school as a young man, and, when he abandoned he his faith, he used the techniques from the school to develop his unique screaming-madman routine on the microphone (where he didn’t actually scream, just used the techniques).

Since most of upstate/western NY is rural, it’s followed the typical pattern today of being more Republican. Only in urban centers (e.g. Albany) will you find more blue. It’s just that New York City is so population-heavy it dominates the state. NYC and Long Island really should be spun off into a separate state, to save both sides a lot of headaches.

As a New Yorker, I would like to see the state adopt the Maine/Nebraska method of electoral college vote-tallying. Also, it would really help if the Republican Party didn't just write off whole electoral districts. In my district there was no opposition candidate - at all - to the Democratic party's candidates for the House or the State Senate.

First, Steve's upstate and yours are probably different. He probably means the bedroom communities of NYC south of Albany.

Second, while many upstate New Yorkers are conservative socially and like guns while abhoring abortion, they are primarily employed by prisons, hospitals, schools, and other institutions that rely on big government. For example, Dannemora, NY, the Adirondack town around the famous Kojak high security prison, is full of what are basically race-realist gun-toting leftists--ie, NYS prison guards.

My experience living in Western New York in the early 2000's is that it was the most unashamedly race realist region I've visited, even more so than the South. Even those who considered themselves liberal were not shy about letting you know that they didn't buy into leftist orthodoxy regarding race.

The opinions of this South Buffalo resident are the norm for Whites in Buffalo, not the exception.

Interesting side note to the Rockefeller family: there was a man from Germany who convinced a number of people he was Clark Rockefeller, distant kin to the famous family. He turned out to be a murderer:

Never heard of upstate New York being Lefty. Most of NY State is pretty rural and anti-lefty. Even the city of Buffalo has a strong anti-lefty populace---you can actually run into large abortion protests there today.

Western New York was the center of the old "burned over district" from the Second Great Awakening period---where a lot of the evangelization took place and was centered. This was old left-Protestant, not modern-irreligious-psycho lefty. The religion drove politics then, not the other way around.

At least until the late 1980s, there was a famous Pentecostal preacher-training school located in Western NY, which trained preachers in the distinctive style of the screaming hellfire-and-brimstone speaking seen in some Hollywood movies. Comedian Sam Kinnison actually studied at this school as a young man, and, when he abandoned he his faith, he used the techniques from the school to develop his unique screaming-madman routine on the microphone (where he didn't actually scream, just used the techniques).

Since most of upstate/western NY is rural, it's followed the typical pattern today of being more Republican. Only in urban centers (e.g. Albany) will you find more blue. It's just that New York City is so population-heavy it dominates the state. NYC and Long Island really should be spun off into a separate state, to save both sides a lot of headaches.

As a New Yorker, I would like to see the state adopt the Maine/Nebraska method of electoral college vote-tallying. Also, it would really help if the Republican Party didn’t just write off whole electoral districts. In my district there was no opposition candidate – at all – to the Democratic party’s candidates for the House or the State Senate.

My central committee found a candidate for every district in my lefty college town. Except one was too stupid to handle his post-filing paperwork (online) and never made it to the ballot. There's not all that much incentive in it, for all the hassle of doorknocking and sign-placing and fundraising, and our people are generally working or building a business.

As a New Yorker, I would like to see the state adopt the Maine/Nebraska method of electoral college vote-tallying

As a New York native and lifelong student of the Electoral College, I would not want to see this at all. New York split her vote in the 1820s, and paid dearly. They adopted the unit rule forthwith, and dominated the next century.

Read Judith Best's book. She's at SUNY Cortland, in the heart of upstate, and knows the EC better than anyone.

Secession would be a better deal for upstaters. Maybe into three or four states. Twenty million is ridiculously ungovernable.

This from the gloater-in-chief prior to the election, so smugly assuring us Hillary would win and destroy us. How many times did we see outright genocidal hate from you? Practically every comment from you was either commentary gloating that white women will breed away whiteness with black men, commentary cheering that white men are going to die out, or commentary that whites were soon to be rounded up and persecuted.

And now that you've lost, you're upset that others are celebrating their victory (and not even saying hate speech as you did).

Frankly, if you are a gay as you've recently claimed, if you had any sense at all you would be down on your knees thanking Trump for using the Sailer Strategy and getting white America to save you from your own foolish missteps- Hillary would've cheerfully imported millions of anti-gay Muslims. If you need to see the wisdom of that idea, take a look at Europe. Or Orlando.

Ever notice how Tiny Duck is very quick off the mark? When a comment-tree starts, it's even money against the book that Tiny will already be numbered in the top 3 posts? Is Tiny a robot, bolted down at NSA headquarters? Will the new Trump Administration pull the plug on Tiny at the stroke of noon, January 20, 2017?

So many Dems are so far into fantasyland over the election, they don’t realize how insane their arguments are.

A number of talking heads on the left are complaining about how Trump stole North Carolina, Florida, etc. through ‘voter suppression’, that massive numbers of voters would’ve voted if there hadn’t been a push for voter IDs, and how they’d have otherwise won the states.

Practically every other interaction with the government is a labyrinth of headaches, often requiring multiple IDs, verification from several sources, etc. The whole reason for Republicans pushing for IDs, of course, is the proven rampant cheating from Hillary’s crew, multiple voting, busing around voters, dead voters, illegals voting under others names, etc. Requesting someone show an ID is not suppressing anyone who legitimately is eligible to vote.

The Dem argument is insane, analogous to if a teenager hired a ringer to take his GREs, then was foiled when he found that the testing facility required a valid ID to take the test- “I could’ve gotten into an Ivy League School!”

So many Dems are so far into fantasyland over the election, they don't realize how insane their arguments are.

A number of talking heads on the left are complaining about how Trump stole North Carolina, Florida, etc. through 'voter suppression', that massive numbers of voters would've voted if there hadn't been a push for voter IDs, and how they'd have otherwise won the states.

Practically every other interaction with the government is a labyrinth of headaches, often requiring multiple IDs, verification from several sources, etc. The whole reason for Republicans pushing for IDs, of course, is the proven rampant cheating from Hillary's crew, multiple voting, busing around voters, dead voters, illegals voting under others names, etc. Requesting someone show an ID is not suppressing anyone who legitimately is eligible to vote.

The Dem argument is insane, analogous to if a teenager hired a ringer to take his GREs, then was foiled when he found that the testing facility required a valid ID to take the test- "I could've gotten into an Ivy League School!"

This was the first time I voted in the last 7 or 8 elections where I wasn’t asked by the voting volunteer if I was Ernest Sailer, who died in 2012.

Most of the counties between NYC and Albany consist of a reddish local (i.e., born there) population of service workers (auto mechanics, building contractors, government employees), with an overlaid bluish refugee (i.e., not born there--mostly from metro-NYC) population of aging hipsters, superannuated hippies, wealthy bobos, NYC careerists retired to their country homes, etc. Further north = more of the former, less of the latter.

It makes for an inversion of the stereotypical D/R divide. The blue collar underclass are the Repubs and the wealthy, idle overclass are the Dems.

People have been moving out of Upstate for many years, few are moving in. There can't be many (any?) refugees from Newark or Hartford. NYC? Upstate gets some retirees and second home people, but it's not much.

I wonder what percentage of Whites in Upstate New York are refugees from New York City, Newark, and Hartford?

Outside of Ulster County and perhaps the Albany area for government jobs, not many. It's mostly used as a vacation/second home area by New Yorkers. They don't move there. Winters are brutal, and civilization, as a New Yorker would understand it, is sparse.

Chances are high that Trump read a lot as a child and young man. I don't think you get into or through Wharton without being willing to read. He read Adios America not so long ago.

But now? He knows what he's doing. This should be the mentoring phase of his career, but it probably includes implementation. In any case, he knows what he's doing now. He doesn’t need to read for the most part aside from paperwork.

Trump's a doer and a leader, not the wonky guy, as he's always shown and never hidden. But let's never assume anything with him.

As Steve (or someone else, can't remember) pointed out after reading The Art of Deal, Trump makes it seem like a real estate magnate's job is to make everyone else think everyone else is on board---the zoning board, the lenders, the contractors, the unions, the neighborhood groups, the future tenants, etc.---so balancing them all out is largely a schmooze-and-finesse job, requiring a lot of conversations, bravado, and chutzpah. Not a lot of time for wonky reading, but his instincts are honed extremely well.

He his staff to draw up the(wonky) deals, and then negotiates the big (and small) points with the other guys. So he's a big picture guy---the schmoozing, the handholding, the negotiating---and relies on his ability to hire the right people to make sure the details are strong for him, as well as to inform him what he needs to be negotiating for.

Then again, Trump is famous for seeming to be impulsive, unpredictable, and to hide what he will do, while all the while having solid, long-term plans and options always open (he registered Make America Great Again as a trademark in friggin' 2012 people; this man is not some man-child who just got up last year and ran for president on a whim; he planned this out years in advance).

So Trump may actually be a pretty, well-read wonky dude, but is hiding it from the public to give himself an edge--if your opponent think you're stupid, they're likely to make a very obvious mistake you can pounce on (a classic Sun Tzu Art of War technique). Just look at how, despite 40 years of real estate brilliance and celebrity and TV Show hit making, he got the entire Republican AND Democrat party AND the media to think he's a big dumb blowhard who has no idea what he's doing or saying from one minute to the next. He got Hillary Clinton to consistently fall into his easy traps despite her 40 years of backstabbing political life, all by playing dumb.

Crazy like a fox. Like I said, it could be Trump doesn't read that much, or it could be that he's hiding it from the world. When the Trump Library is built (of solid gold, at the top of Trump Tower, Manhattan), perhaps we will find out.

Never heard of upstate New York being Lefty. Most of NY State is pretty rural and anti-lefty. Even the city of Buffalo has a strong anti-lefty populace---you can actually run into large abortion protests there today.

Western New York was the center of the old "burned over district" from the Second Great Awakening period---where a lot of the evangelization took place and was centered. This was old left-Protestant, not modern-irreligious-psycho lefty. The religion drove politics then, not the other way around.

At least until the late 1980s, there was a famous Pentecostal preacher-training school located in Western NY, which trained preachers in the distinctive style of the screaming hellfire-and-brimstone speaking seen in some Hollywood movies. Comedian Sam Kinnison actually studied at this school as a young man, and, when he abandoned he his faith, he used the techniques from the school to develop his unique screaming-madman routine on the microphone (where he didn't actually scream, just used the techniques).

Since most of upstate/western NY is rural, it's followed the typical pattern today of being more Republican. Only in urban centers (e.g. Albany) will you find more blue. It's just that New York City is so population-heavy it dominates the state. NYC and Long Island really should be spun off into a separate state, to save both sides a lot of headaches.

The situation is more complicated than you describe.

First, Steve’s upstate and yours are probably different. He probably means the bedroom communities of NYC south of Albany.

Second, while many upstate New Yorkers are conservative socially and like guns while abhoring abortion, they are primarily employed by prisons, hospitals, schools, and other institutions that rely on big government. For example, Dannemora, NY, the Adirondack town around the famous Kojak high security prison, is full of what are basically race-realist gun-toting leftists–ie, NYS prison guards.

In addition to the Finger Lakes and Western New York rural areas, upstate New York encompasses Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse and Binghamton—all of which have lost huge numbers of steady blue collar factory jobs in the last three decades.

"Upstate", to many New York City dwellers, however, often still means just the Hudson Valley line to Albany, and beyond to Saratoga Springs, Lake George and Lake Champlain. Namely, the watering holes of the old 19th century Knickerbocker aristocracy.

The pound sterling has suffered a 20% devaluation post brexit vote.
Supposedly, this is due to ‘market’ ‘fears over uncertainty’.
Yet, the UK inflation rate is remarkably subdued. All things considered, sterling just *had* to suffer a major devaluation, brexit or no brexit, in the near future due to the simple fact that the UK is running an enormous and persistent trade deficit. Simple economics. Yet the remoaners whine, whine and whine about the sterling devaluation.
Incidentally, EU membership did absolutely nothing whatsoever to improve the UK’s trading position, which was way back in 1973, a main plank of the argument for accession to the then EEC.

Infrastructure spending is Obama’s idea which met the adamantine Republican wall and went nowhere. Now that a (liberal) Republican has been elected, of course it’s now a great idea!

Predictions:

Trump will deport no more than Obama has over the last eight years.
The Affordable Care Act will be modified and not repealed ( though Republicans will call it a repeal).
The vast majority of “illegals” will have a legal path that Obama could not achieve due to Republican intransigence.

H1-B visas will not be dramatically curtailed and paths to residence through F-1s will increase.

In other words, the new majority party passes what the previous majority party wanted to pass.

Nelson died at 70 which is not young but not particularly old either. On the other hand, he died happy because he had a heart attack while doing the nasty with a 25 year old aide. It's possible that he could have been saved but the girl panicked and an ambulance was not called for an hour.

The Democrats are at risk of losing a major amount of Senate seats in 2018, should Trump maintain (or likely exceed) his current popularity levels. The crazier the SJW reaction gets, the harsher the backlash will be.

A large trache of money is already availiable for a massive infrastructure program, its called telling LockMart to stuff it on the F-35 cost overruns. A failing system of public services is the true cost of our endless wars.

‘New York, which was largely settled by post-Puritans from New England’

The Dutch and the Mayflower seem to arrive about the same time, only the Dutch do not seem to nearly starve to death nor are they constantly waring with the Indians. Note the foundational myth of Dutch settlement is paying Indians for Manhattan. The Dutch surrender on good terms to the British in 1664.

Infrastructure spending is Obama's idea which met the adamantine Republican wall and went nowhere. Now that a (liberal) Republican has been elected, of course it's now a great idea!

Predictions:

Trump will deport no more than Obama has over the last eight years.
The Affordable Care Act will be modified and not repealed ( though Republicans will call it a repeal).
The vast majority of "illegals" will have a legal path that Obama could not achieve due to Republican intransigence.

H1-B visas will not be dramatically curtailed and paths to residence through F-1s will increase.

In other words, the new majority party passes what the previous majority party wanted to pass.

First, Steve's upstate and yours are probably different. He probably means the bedroom communities of NYC south of Albany.

Second, while many upstate New Yorkers are conservative socially and like guns while abhoring abortion, they are primarily employed by prisons, hospitals, schools, and other institutions that rely on big government. For example, Dannemora, NY, the Adirondack town around the famous Kojak high security prison, is full of what are basically race-realist gun-toting leftists--ie, NYS prison guards.

In addition to the Finger Lakes and Western New York rural areas, upstate New York encompasses Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse and Binghamton—all of which have lost huge numbers of steady blue collar factory jobs in the last three decades.

“Upstate”, to many New York City dwellers, however, often still means just the Hudson Valley line to Albany, and beyond to Saratoga Springs, Lake George and Lake Champlain. Namely, the watering holes of the old 19th century Knickerbocker aristocracy.

Having grown up in the Finger Lakes and having lived in NYC and Westchester, I can tell you that most Long Islanders and city dwellers believe upstate to be anything across the Throg's Neck/Whitestone.

When I lived in Westchester, I had Long Islanders ask me if I got the same radio stations they did.

With the Steve bannon brouhaha it has become clear to People of Color that whites are hateful

Look at the response to the rise of hate crimes whites. All them hoaxes just because there is no evidence

Bannon the racist will be destroyed. We shall overcome. You white jerks will be brought to heel

“I’m seeing a lot of gloating from the right.”

This from the gloater-in-chief prior to the election, so smugly assuring us Hillary would win and destroy us. How many times did we see outright genocidal hate from you? Practically every comment from you was either commentary gloating that white women will breed away whiteness with black men, commentary cheering that white men are going to die out, or commentary that whites were soon to be rounded up and persecuted.

And now that you’ve lost, you’re upset that others are celebrating their victory (and not even saying hate speech as you did).

Frankly, if you are a gay as you’ve recently claimed, if you had any sense at all you would be down on your knees thanking Trump for using the Sailer Strategy and getting white America to save you from your own foolish missteps- Hillary would’ve cheerfully imported millions of anti-gay Muslims. If you need to see the wisdom of that idea, take a look at Europe. Or Orlando.

Can Congress put in a requirement that contractors and subcontractors hire legal workers only (and not illegal aliens)? Where I am, I see widespread use by the federal and local governments of illegal aliens for construction, maintenance, and landscaping work. Shouldn’t there be a law against this?

I don’t know if Trump is dyslexic but clearly reading is less important to him than conversation and television.

It was a surprise to me when I realised that Trump is not in fact terribly articulate. He can do the big picture bullet points well – or big persuasion hooks? – but he sometimes trips over himself if he attempts to juggle two or three thoughts at the same time.

So he badly mishandled the gold star sharia-supporting parents who a better rhetorician could have used against the Dems. Or he could have just shut up.

Socrates disagreed but I think a measure deep reading is necessary to be truly articulate – and not just, say, cunning in a souk salesman sort of way (this is not aimed at Trump).

This may not matter, indeed his bold talk can be creative in a taboo-breaking way, but it would seem to be important that he is aware of his limitations.

One issue that Trump (or Hillary if she had won) will run up against is the debt and the increased cost of the boomers.

Debt held by the public is now ~105% of GDP. (Granted, the fed reserve own maybe around 15% of that, so it might not be considered “public.”) Now, there’s no “right” figure despite what people have interpreted from Rogoff and Reinhart. God knows what Japan’s number is, and they continue to function. However, it does represent dark clouds on the horizon if nothing else.

Luckily, low interest rates and surprisingly low medical cost inflation have kept deficits lower than expected. How long will that last? Who knows. But one way or the other, the costs of the baby boomers will either push up deficits or taxes (or both). You start throwing in infrastructure spending and you exacerbate that those issues.

Again, not to say that infrastructure spending is bad (if done right, theoretically, it could increase GDP enough to pay for itself over the long run), but we’re entering uncharted territory with national debt – at least for the United States.

You start having debt to GDP of more than 100% while fed revenues equally ~20% of GDP, you can sell how a percentage point or two increase in interest rates – which remain historically low – would wreak havoc with the federal budget as interest costs either squeeze out other spending or taxes are forced to go up dramatically to cover the costs.

Of course, at the moment, the world seems perfectly fine with U.S. taking out as much in loans as it wants. Interest rates prove that. And to some degree, why not take out a productive loan when rates are so low.

I’m just saying that when any country (I’m looking at you Japan) faces a situation where a one percentage point increase in interest rates from historical lows equal 5% or more of your entire federal budget in the form of increased interest payments, you’re taking a risk by increasing your debt.

Japan's debt is over 200% of GDP and it has lower interest rates than us.

Trump has room to move here. But the key is to rein in the trade deficit before enacting big spending, so the US economy benefits fully from it. Otherwise it's like turning on the heat with all the windows open.

I wonder what percentage of Whites in Upstate New York are refugees from New York City, Newark, and Hartford?

Most of the counties between NYC and Albany consist of a reddish local (i.e., born there) population of service workers (auto mechanics, building contractors, government employees), with an overlaid bluish refugee (i.e., not born there–mostly from metro-NYC) population of aging hipsters, superannuated hippies, wealthy bobos, NYC careerists retired to their country homes, etc. Further north = more of the former, less of the latter.

It makes for an inversion of the stereotypical D/R divide. The blue collar underclass are the Repubs and the wealthy, idle overclass are the Dems.

I wonder what percentage of Whites in Upstate New York are refugees from New York City, Newark, and Hartford?

People have been moving out of Upstate for many years, few are moving in. There can’t be many (any?) refugees from Newark or Hartford. NYC? Upstate gets some retirees and second home people, but it’s not much.

“I don’t know if Trump is dyslexic but clearly reading is less important to him than conversation and television.”

That’s a relative claim, so I guess maybe its true, but I’ve seen you comment before, I believe on the SSC blog, that Trump doesn’t seem like that well read a guy

I think you’re probably off

Not sure if you’ve taken the time to dig through his any of his books, but he makes claims to read, what I would consider a pretty prodigious amount (maybe your standards for what counts for reading a lot are different than mine)

its pretty light fare, of not exceptionally original life advice, but I do feel like it gives you some interesting insights into the guy

few highlights:

pg 91 – says he spends 3 hours a day reading a reflecting, states that he finds that the best time to do this is to get up at 5AM, states that he reads “newspapers and magizines of all sorts”, states that after black tie events in the evening he likes to go home and read books “usually biographies” “now and then I like to read about philosophers – particularly Socrates”

With the Steve bannon brouhaha it has become clear to People of Color that whites are hateful

Look at the response to the rise of hate crimes whites. All them hoaxes just because there is no evidence

Bannon the racist will be destroyed. We shall overcome. You white jerks will be brought to heel

Ever notice how Tiny Duck is very quick off the mark? When a comment-tree starts, it’s even money against the book that Tiny will already be numbered in the top 3 posts? Is Tiny a robot, bolted down at NSA headquarters? Will the new Trump Administration pull the plug on Tiny at the stroke of noon, January 20, 2017?

His AI is not very convincing. It keeps bringing up the same themes - that white people will be replaced, killed, imprisoned, forced to pay reparations, bear colored children, etc. You would think that after the election that they would have updated his program to say something fresh but it doesn't seem to have been updated at all. Release 2.0 is well overdue.

If TD really is human, it's pretty pathetic that he harps on the same themes so much that he can be mistaken for a bot. Then again, Paul Krugman is no different.

We have inflation now. It is asset inflation, instead of wholesale price inflation. The reason is the nature of money. The Bretton Woods system made it possible for governments to print their way out of debt, but the result was high price inflation. The Louvre Accords systems makes it easy for government to maintain outlandishly high debt levels, but the result is asset inflation.

I think a better way to think about what Trump is up to is to look at it as a change in priorities. He has not said it, as far as I know, but my guess is he thinks we should have spent a trillion on roads and bridges in the US, rather than in Afghanistan or Iraq. For the cost of our campaign against the muzzies, we could have fixed entitlements, health care, the roads and built a nice wall.

Anyone who thinks price inflation is low right now isn't paying attention. The government stats cook the books by using substitution and other tricks to mask rising prices. The real inflation rate is as much as 8 percentage points higher than the official figures: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

In any case, with the huge amount of high-powered money given to them by the Fed (Quantitative Easing, etc.), the banks are sitting on a price inflation bomb that will go off when the economy begins to move again and they start lending that money out. Hundreds of billions of dollars are now being held in reserve, not doing anything. When they are loaned out, they will expand by a factor of ten.

And remember, the loss of jobs in the U.S. is not really the result of "unfair trade practices" by the Chinese, or whatever other excuse given for more state interference in commerce. It's really due to the massive Federal deficit. Americans buy goods made in China and elsewhere, and pay in dollars. The Chinese then need to find a place to spend those dollars. Except for buying oil and a few other commodities, holders of dollars have little choice but to spend them in the U.S.

Normally, that would mean purchasing American assets, goods, and services. The money would come back to the U.S. economy, and much of it would be invested. But the gigantic Federal deficit means that holders of dollars don't have to take the risk of investing in U.S. ventures: They can merely put their dollars into Federal bonds. As far as our economy goes, that's money down the toilet.

That's why an "infrastructure" program won't do the economy any long-term good, as long as its financed from deficits.

I wonder what percentage of Whites in Upstate New York are refugees from New York City, Newark, and Hartford?

I wonder what percentage of Whites in Upstate New York are refugees from New York City, Newark, and Hartford?

Outside of Ulster County and perhaps the Albany area for government jobs, not many. It’s mostly used as a vacation/second home area by New Yorkers. They don’t move there. Winters are brutal, and civilization, as a New Yorker would understand it, is sparse.

Never heard of upstate New York being Lefty. Most of NY State is pretty rural and anti-lefty. Even the city of Buffalo has a strong anti-lefty populace---you can actually run into large abortion protests there today.

Western New York was the center of the old "burned over district" from the Second Great Awakening period---where a lot of the evangelization took place and was centered. This was old left-Protestant, not modern-irreligious-psycho lefty. The religion drove politics then, not the other way around.

At least until the late 1980s, there was a famous Pentecostal preacher-training school located in Western NY, which trained preachers in the distinctive style of the screaming hellfire-and-brimstone speaking seen in some Hollywood movies. Comedian Sam Kinnison actually studied at this school as a young man, and, when he abandoned he his faith, he used the techniques from the school to develop his unique screaming-madman routine on the microphone (where he didn't actually scream, just used the techniques).

Since most of upstate/western NY is rural, it's followed the typical pattern today of being more Republican. Only in urban centers (e.g. Albany) will you find more blue. It's just that New York City is so population-heavy it dominates the state. NYC and Long Island really should be spun off into a separate state, to save both sides a lot of headaches.

My experience living in Western New York in the early 2000′s is that it was the most unashamedly race realist region I’ve visited, even more so than the South. Even those who considered themselves liberal were not shy about letting you know that they didn’t buy into leftist orthodoxy regarding race.

The opinions of this South Buffalo resident are the norm for Whites in Buffalo, not the exception.

Asians who grew up overseas seem to feel less compunction to adjust their language about different races to make them feel comfortable if they're not around. If you learn an Asian language and hear them talking about say, blacks or Hispanics, you can really catch an earful.

I have some fluency in Mandarin, and overheard some Chinese women talking about a man one of them observed trying to shoplift from a store in town a few months ago.

"Who did it?"

"A black man (said in a non-surprised, "of course" tone)".

"They always steal. My friend's sister had had her purse stolen in Washington, DC by a black man last year."

Well, traditionally liberal Upstate New York, which was largely settled by post-Puritans from New England

I don’t know about that Steve. My upstate ancestors came from the West Country of England to Long Island and western Connecticut, then went upstate in late 1700′s. They and many others were Anglican/Episcopalian, and many neighbors were Methodists, not New England Puritan/Congregationalists/United Church of Christ/Unitarian.

Proglob has been saying the GOP must reach out to traditional Democrat constituents if it is to win elections in the future.

Otherwise, the party will not survive.

Well, Trump did just that. He defended the American Worker(Labor) and proposed a plan for World Peace(and favored over Hillary by even Jill Stein). And he even did a bit of the ‘Detroit Republican’ by telling blacks that too many wars and too few walls leave blacks economically behind.

For reaching beyond the traditional base of the GOP, shouldn’t the Democrats be praising him?

Instead, it just made them more angry.

Democrats really want the GOP to make FUTILE appeals to the immigrant community. They know it will be a double-whammy for the GOP. Few immigrants will be won over to the ‘white party’(labeled as such by media PC) and, worse, even white conservatives will give up on the GOP that goes for amnesty and MORE immigration. GOP will be like the dog with bone looking at the bone in water. It will lose both the real bone in the mouth and fantasy bone in the water.

Trump did reach across the aisle but at groups that were most likely to be won over by his appeal — white middle/working class — , and he did play on the foreign policy issues to embarrass Obama an Hillary in the eyes of progs. He also tied his anxiety about Muslims with Obama/Hillary’s war policies in Middle East.

Democrats want the GOP to be even more pro-war than the Democrats. Thus, even war-mongering war-criminals like Hillary and Obama will seem relatively sane compared to the likes of Rubio, Jeb, Fiorina, and etc who say US shoulda invaded Syria or declared new cold war with Russia.
But Trump didn’t play that game, and it made Hillary seem like the unhinged war monger that she is.
If it had been Hillary vs Rubio, it would have been ‘new cold war’ by Hillary vs ‘new hot war’ by Rubio. Even Hillary would have seemed reasonable in contrast.

Democrats and Proglob are so disingenuous. They’ve been tricking the GOP to ‘reach over’ and grab a handful of killer bees than a handful of honey.

Proglob say Trump’s politics is racial cuz Working Class often means ‘white working class’.
But how is it any less racial to favor non-whites over whites and to favor Jewish elite agenda over white middle class agenda?

A few mass murderer dictators like Lenin, Stalin and Hitler were bookworms. I don't know much about Mao, but I read his calligraphy skills were considered great. I read somewhere a Taiwanese TV made a show or documentary or something about China, with the title being simply "China", and they chose a really nice calligraphy of the word as the head title. Later they had to change it when it was found out that it was a calligraphy by Mao...

I’d say Trump has much more in common with the interior north Republican political tradition of Abraham Lincoln, Ulyssess Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Senator Bob LaFollette, Senator Robert Taft, and Senator Robert Dole, than Nelson Rockefeller or any of the New England/Northeast internationalists like Lodge and Scranton (or the Bushes or Romney’s).

Trump’s political support is centered on the area in and behind the Appalachians over to the Rockies, not coastal New England. He was decisively rejected in all the Rockefeller Republican/Country Club Republican neighborhoods in the northeast, which went for Kasich in the primary and Clinton in the general, and he had no special draw in the southern coastal areas and was disdained in the coastal west.

He is a fusion candidate of Appalachia, the Ozarks, the Midlands, the Great Plains and the northern Midwest.

I was never enamored of Rockefeller. He was disconnected from "normal" people, and he was a mean little fucker. With Teddy, you might not even like him, but nobody can claim he didn't solicit the response of, "yes! just cut the shit and get it done!!" in spite of all our civic training and habits.

I'm just praying I'm right, and we have a version of Teddy on our hands.

Trump also reached out to homos and trannies. Not exactly in celebratory way but as people who can wee-wee at Trump Tower and whom he will defend from Muslims.

This actually makes the Dems angry because their most sacred faith of the hour has lost its luster.
The Homo bomb nas bee defused.

Progs via media made homo stuff holy and fooled people into believing cons will round up homos and kill them. As with KKKrage at Oberlin, it fills proggies with adrenaline and righteousness.

But Trump killed two birds with stone.

1. He made homo agenda into a boring issue since he made a banal statement about how Jenner can wee-wee at Trump Tower. Wanna wee-wee? wee-wee.

2. He showed that the Deplorables stuck with him despite his homo stance.

So, homo agenda lost by winning. The homo magic for progs was its crusade aspect, a religious movement against the forces of darkness who would feed homos to the lions.

But Trump and his followers were like, “okay, wee wee at Trump Tower.”

It’s hard to play martyr against that.

If anything, Trump pivoted the homo-martyr issue to argue that the main threat to homos came from the immigrant community from nations that toss homos off roofs.

Anti-Trump protesters still claim that Trump means to ‘kill gays’, but their real rage is that Trump has defused the ‘gay bomb’ by halfway endorsing it. Giving it an okay without howling at the moon about it.

As a New Yorker, I would like to see the state adopt the Maine/Nebraska method of electoral college vote-tallying. Also, it would really help if the Republican Party didn't just write off whole electoral districts. In my district there was no opposition candidate - at all - to the Democratic party's candidates for the House or the State Senate.

My central committee found a candidate for every district in my lefty college town. Except one was too stupid to handle his post-filing paperwork (online) and never made it to the ballot. There’s not all that much incentive in it, for all the hassle of doorknocking and sign-placing and fundraising, and our people are generally working or building a business.

In addition to the Finger Lakes and Western New York rural areas, upstate New York encompasses Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse and Binghamton—all of which have lost huge numbers of steady blue collar factory jobs in the last three decades.

"Upstate", to many New York City dwellers, however, often still means just the Hudson Valley line to Albany, and beyond to Saratoga Springs, Lake George and Lake Champlain. Namely, the watering holes of the old 19th century Knickerbocker aristocracy.

Having grown up in the Finger Lakes and having lived in NYC and Westchester, I can tell you that most Long Islanders and city dwellers believe upstate to be anything across the Throg’s Neck/Whitestone.

When I lived in Westchester, I had Long Islanders ask me if I got the same radio stations they did.

“One listing posted by a man in New York City comes with a NSFW picture of his bottom and a simple message: “This is not a solution, but maybe a small, fun, cathartic escape. Take out your anger by putting me over your knee and giving me a hard spanking!” This sentiment is echoed in another New York listing that says ‘I voted for trump. If you are feeling angry about trump, and you feel like relieving some stress, use me as your personal kicking/punching bag. [sic]‘”

Most of the counties between NYC and Albany consist of a reddish local (i.e., born there) population of service workers (auto mechanics, building contractors, government employees), with an overlaid bluish refugee (i.e., not born there--mostly from metro-NYC) population of aging hipsters, superannuated hippies, wealthy bobos, NYC careerists retired to their country homes, etc. Further north = more of the former, less of the latter.

It makes for an inversion of the stereotypical D/R divide. The blue collar underclass are the Repubs and the wealthy, idle overclass are the Dems.

You can see why upstate hearkened to the Trumpening.

> It makes for an inversion of the stereotypical D/R divide. The blue collar underclass are the Repubs and the wealthy, idle overclass are the Dems.

How is that an inversion? That’s exactly how it is everywhere across America.

In the 70's mom read me an essay by Nelson Rockefeller on his childhood learning disability. As a dyslexic myself, it gave me a lot of encouragement. A sort of Ugly Duckling story for retards.

The Latin for "read" means to "pick out" suggesting that those who could read a few thousand years ago did so with some considerable effort.

There are very few books around Trump's apartment. There are a few current coffee table books and one case of nice looking leather bound sets, likely never touched unless someone dusts them.

Chances are high that Trump read a lot as a child and young man. I don’t think you get into or through Wharton without being willing to read. He read Adios America not so long ago.

But now? He knows what he’s doing. This should be the mentoring phase of his career, but it probably includes implementation. In any case, he knows what he’s doing now. He doesn’t need to read for the most part aside from paperwork.

The guy who ghost wrote The Art of the Deal (and who was a very typical New York liberal type doing everything he could to help Hillary so you have to take what he said with a grain of salt) said that Trump had a very short attention span. His parents also sent him to military academy which is something you do with kids who have problems staying disciplined on their own. I could see Trump being the kind of guy who would prefer reading the Cliff Notes instead of reading the whole long novel.

Trump's ghostwriter for Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, said this: "I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.

Again, take it with a grain of salt but I don't think that Trump is some sort of secret intellectual who is just hiding it real well. Then again, if you look at the people who ARE supposed to be our public intellectuals, their ideas mostly stink and they have been leading us down blind alleys and into dead ends for the last century or more, with plenty of dead in their wake.

Remember that the inflation of the 70s was actually very good for the working and middle classes. The prices of consumer goods they produced went up, and their real wages went up, especially as their mortgage debt which was nominally fixed was being inflated away. It was bad for the professional, upper-middle, and upper classes, who don’t produce but only consume consumer goods, make loans and own debt, and own real estate and financial assets. This is why the media and elites generally portray the inflation of that period has having been extremely terrible. The strategy of Reagan and Thatcher was to make cultural appeals and appeals to patriotism to the working and middle class while screwing them economically and giving them cheap imports so they wouldn’t riot.

"Remember that the inflation of the 70s was actually very good for the working and middle classes."

My parents told me how it was good for them. They had signed on to buy a house a year or two before it started to take off, and got a heck of a deal in the long run as the terms of the loan were already set.

Anyone who thinks price inflation is low right now isn't paying attention. The government stats cook the books by using substitution and other tricks to mask rising prices. The real inflation rate is about 4 percentage points higher than the official figures: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

In any case, with the huge amount of high-powered money given to them by the Fed (Quantitative Easing, etc.), the banks are sitting on a price inflation bomb that will go off when the economy begins to move again and they start lending that money out. Hundreds of billions of dollars are now being held in reserve, not doing anything. When they are loaned out, they will expand by a factor of ten.

And remember, the loss of jobs in the U.S. is not really the result of "unfair trade practices" by the Chinese, or whatever other excuse given for more state interference in commerce. It's really due to the massive Federal deficit. Americans buy goods made in China and elsewhere, and pay in dollars. The Chinese then need to find a place to spend those dollars. Except for buying oil and a few other commodities, holders of dollars have little choice but to spend them in the U.S.

Normally, that would mean purchasing American assets, goods, and services. The money would come back to the U.S. economy, and much of it would be invested. But the gigantic Federal deficit means that holders of dollars don't have to take the risk of investing in U.S. ventures: They can merely put their dollars into Federal bonds. As far as our economy goes, that's money down the toilet.

That's why an "infrastructure" program won't do the economy any long-term good, as long as its financed from deficits.

How does it feel? Knowing that the churches you attended will be converted into mosques. That your daughters will bear Children of Color. That your sons will have to play on a level playing field. That you will have to pay reparations. That you will not be allowed on social media. That your fake news sites will be shit down.

On infrastructure spending, child tax credits, paid maternity leave and dismantling trade agreements, Democrats are looking for ways they can work with Mr. Trump and force Republican leaders to choose between their new president and their small-government, free-market principles.

Isn't that called leverage? If the opposing team wants something more than your team, doesn't that mean you can ask for more? I'm no legislative expert, but can't Trump slip in some immigration enforcement proposal (e-verify, money for fence/wall etc.) in return for giving the democrats what they want on infrastructure. If his first major piece of legislation includes massive infrastructure spending and e-verify, how popular do you think that will be? I would guess 80% or 90% of Americans would approve of such a bill. Based on the polling I've seen e-verify has like a 75% approval rating, and so does more infrastructure spending.

Until now both parties have fought tooth & nail to avoid proposing policies that the vast majority of voters would approve of.

Seriously, daily mail is a great site if you zoom in enough to block out the right column trash. Telling the story through photos is very powerful and yet no american news site will follow their lead…….

>>Yeah, what’s up with that? Not only does nothing set it off, nobody even cares about inflation anymore

Uh oh.<<

We have tons of inflation, it is just going into assets, not to wages. Quantitative easing: Fed lends easy money to banks, or better yet, buys up worthless assets from the banks. Instead of finding creative ways to get this easy money into the hands of responsible citizens for productive use, the banks speculate on stocks, commodities, bonds, land, etc.. JP Morgan has a fleet of loaded tankers floating around the world waiting for the right time to unload their cargo. Hedge funds bought up massive amounts of cheap housing whose owners defaulted on their mortgages. We could go on. Is that what financial institutions are supposed to do? I don't think so. All bad things come to a bad end. This will come to a bad end someday too.

Infrastructure spending is Obama's idea which met the adamantine Republican wall and went nowhere. Now that a (liberal) Republican has been elected, of course it's now a great idea!

Predictions:

Trump will deport no more than Obama has over the last eight years.
The Affordable Care Act will be modified and not repealed ( though Republicans will call it a repeal).
The vast majority of "illegals" will have a legal path that Obama could not achieve due to Republican intransigence.

H1-B visas will not be dramatically curtailed and paths to residence through F-1s will increase.

In other words, the new majority party passes what the previous majority party wanted to pass.

The pink elephant in the Democrat tent no one talks about is that these groups hate or fear each other more than they do white men. Given how bizarre the Coalition of the Fringes is becoming, and how its getting harder and harder for the Democrats to keep a lid on the whole thing, it seems much more likely that these groups will continue to increase the in-fighting against one another while the White Man sits back with a bag of popcorn and chills.

Go ahead and try to get Muslims to get onboard with single gender bathrooms in their Mosques to appease transgenders. Or force their Imams to perform gay marriages. There's a million of these "intersectionalities" you can come up with, and each one is better than the last.

You guys are hopelessly outnumbered and will soon be a minority. I like our chances.

Nope, white women (and Asian and Hispanic women) keep fraternizing with us "the enemy". I'd say you need to be concerned about the bleaching of your colored wombs by our seed and the lack of fecundity of homosexuals and trannies.

You're us now figuring out that 50% of us don't like you?
This is just another damaging effect of media megaphoning and lack of dialog.

You guys are old and non-fecund. In other words, NOT THE FUTURE.

How does it feel? Knowing that the churches you attended will be converted into mosques. That your daughters will bear Children of Color. That your sons will have to play on a level playing field. That you will have to pay reparations. That you will not be allowed on social media. That your fake news sites will be shit down.

Seriously, daily mail is a great site if you zoom in enough to block out the right column trash. Telling the story through photos is very powerful and yet no american news site will follow their lead.......

Anonymous,

Entirely concur with your appreciation of Daily Mail journalism.

An added DM benefit is the reportage and blogging of the “good” Hitchens, i.e. Peter, not his late brother Christopher who for me remains unlamented.

A couple of things: “Rocky” was an insider’s insider, and part of the old Establishment. Trump represents the opposite of that, though he isn’t an outsider, really. Which is why conspiracy theorists posited that he was running to throw the election to Hillary. The only reason that was plausible is because he’s a cocktail party and golf outing buddy of the rich and powerful.

Secondly, where did we ever get this notion that it’s “liberal” to be a big spender? Aside from the nonsense Republicans say to get elected, I mean. Does anybody else remember Bush the Younger? Two big wars, Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and God knows what else.

Democrats do own the shovel-ready spiel, because of the New Deal, I guess. So they’re the Infrastructure Party, or better yet the dig a hole and fill it back in party. Trump is a builder, literally, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he becomes more of a Shovel President than Obama, who wouldn’t shut up about shovels years ago.

P.S. Hitler and Mussolini put on a show about public works projects, too, and the left is already used to thinking of Trump as a fascist.

My experience living in Western New York in the early 2000's is that it was the most unashamedly race realist region I've visited, even more so than the South. Even those who considered themselves liberal were not shy about letting you know that they didn't buy into leftist orthodoxy regarding race.

The opinions of this South Buffalo resident are the norm for Whites in Buffalo, not the exception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8358g10cRo

Asians who grew up overseas seem to feel less compunction to adjust their language about different races to make them feel comfortable if they’re not around. If you learn an Asian language and hear them talking about say, blacks or Hispanics, you can really catch an earful.

I have some fluency in Mandarin, and overheard some Chinese women talking about a man one of them observed trying to shoplift from a store in town a few months ago.

“Who did it?”

“A black man (said in a non-surprised, “of course” tone)”.

“They always steal. My friend’s sister had had her purse stolen in Washington, DC by a black man last year.”

Trump could also resemble Dwight Eisenhower. Regarding infrastructure, Ike pushed very hard for the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, as well as Intercontinental plane travel. Operation Wetback, which helped curtail (at that time) runaway illegal migration from Mexico. Ike helped bring about the end of the Korean War and there was relative calm on the foreign policy front (no major escalation of defense buildup, especially when compared to Ike’s successors during the ’60′s).

During the GOP primary debates, Trump referenced Ike on both Operation Wetback and for building up US’s infrastructure. This clearly wasn’t a “See how smart I am, guys that I know some basic US trivia”, but more along the lines that as a child of the ’50′s, Trump would’ve been fairly familiar with Eisenhower. Add in the fact that Trump’s father, Fred, a home builder would definitely be well familiar with Ike’s infrastructure policies and there you go.

The pink elephant in the Democrat tent no one talks about is that these groups hate or fear each other more than they do white men. Given how bizarre the Coalition of the Fringes is becoming, and how its getting harder and harder for the Democrats to keep a lid on the whole thing, it seems much more likely that these groups will continue to increase the in-fighting against one another while the White Man sits back with a bag of popcorn and chills.

Go ahead and try to get Muslims to get onboard with single gender bathrooms in their Mosques to appease transgenders. Or force their Imams to perform gay marriages. There’s a million of these “intersectionalities” you can come up with, and each one is better than the last.

How does it feel? Knowing that the churches you attended will be converted into mosques. That your daughters will bear Children of Color. That your sons will have to play on a level playing field. That you will have to pay reparations. That you will not be allowed on social media. That your fake news sites will be shit down.

You guys are old and non-fecund. In other words, NOT THE FUTURE.

(Looks around house, notices all five children are still there.)

What’s that you say bro?

Knowing that the churches you attended will be converted into mosques.

How will that happen?

That your daughters will bear Children of Color.

Correct, they will bear children with blonde & red hair, and blue & green eyes and pink to milk-white skin. You know, actual colors, as opposed to a muddy brown/black.

That your sons will have to play on a level playing field.

Pretty sure my #WhitePrivilege is still going to work for them.

That you will have to pay reparations.

If I have a small amount of slave ancestry, can I get reparations too? Will it be paid to me by mulattoes with a large amount of slave owner ancestry? How will this work?

That you will not be allowed on social media. That your fake news sites will be shit down.

Let me know about how you plan on repealing the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Very curious.

How does it feel? Knowing that the churches you attended will be converted into mosques. That your daughters will bear Children of Color. That your sons will have to play on a level playing field. That you will have to pay reparations. That you will not be allowed on social media. That your fake news sites will be shit down.

You guys are hopelessly outnumbered and will soon be a minority. I like our chances.

You guys are hopelessly outnumbered and will soon be a minority. I like our chances.

Nope, white women (and Asian and Hispanic women) keep fraternizing with us “the enemy”. I’d say you need to be concerned about the bleaching of your colored wombs by our seed and the lack of fecundity of homosexuals and trannies.

Remember that the inflation of the 70s was actually very good for the working and middle classes. The prices of consumer goods they produced went up, and their real wages went up, especially as their mortgage debt which was nominally fixed was being inflated away. It was bad for the professional, upper-middle, and upper classes, who don't produce but only consume consumer goods, make loans and own debt, and own real estate and financial assets. This is why the media and elites generally portray the inflation of that period has having been extremely terrible. The strategy of Reagan and Thatcher was to make cultural appeals and appeals to patriotism to the working and middle class while screwing them economically and giving them cheap imports so they wouldn't riot.

“Remember that the inflation of the 70s was actually very good for the working and middle classes.”

My parents told me how it was good for them. They had signed on to buy a house a year or two before it started to take off, and got a heck of a deal in the long run as the terms of the loan were already set.

I don’t know if Trump is dyslexic but clearly reading is less important to him than conversation and television.

It was a surprise to me when I realised that Trump is not in fact terribly articulate. He can do the big picture bullet points well - or big persuasion hooks? - but he sometimes trips over himself if he attempts to juggle two or three thoughts at the same time.

So he badly mishandled the gold star sharia-supporting parents who a better rhetorician could have used against the Dems. Or he could have just shut up.

Socrates disagreed but I think a measure deep reading is necessary to be truly articulate - and not just, say, cunning in a souk salesman sort of way (this is not aimed at Trump).

This may not matter, indeed his bold talk can be creative in a taboo-breaking way, but it would seem to be important that he is aware of his limitations.

mishandled the gold star sharia-supporting parents who a better rhetorician could have used against the Dems

One issue that Trump (or Hillary if she had won) will run up against is the debt and the increased cost of the boomers.

Debt held by the public is now ~105% of GDP. (Granted, the fed reserve own maybe around 15% of that, so it might not be considered "public.") Now, there's no "right" figure despite what people have interpreted from Rogoff and Reinhart. God knows what Japan's number is, and they continue to function. However, it does represent dark clouds on the horizon if nothing else.

Luckily, low interest rates and surprisingly low medical cost inflation have kept deficits lower than expected. How long will that last? Who knows. But one way or the other, the costs of the baby boomers will either push up deficits or taxes (or both). You start throwing in infrastructure spending and you exacerbate that those issues.

Again, not to say that infrastructure spending is bad (if done right, theoretically, it could increase GDP enough to pay for itself over the long run), but we're entering uncharted territory with national debt - at least for the United States.

You start having debt to GDP of more than 100% while fed revenues equally ~20% of GDP, you can sell how a percentage point or two increase in interest rates - which remain historically low - would wreak havoc with the federal budget as interest costs either squeeze out other spending or taxes are forced to go up dramatically to cover the costs.

Of course, at the moment, the world seems perfectly fine with U.S. taking out as much in loans as it wants. Interest rates prove that. And to some degree, why not take out a productive loan when rates are so low.

I'm just saying that when any country (I'm looking at you Japan) faces a situation where a one percentage point increase in interest rates from historical lows equal 5% or more of your entire federal budget in the form of increased interest payments, you're taking a risk by increasing your debt.

However, if anyone knows debt and how to manage it, it'd be Trump.

Japan’s debt is over 200% of GDP and it has lower interest rates than us.

Trump has room to move here. But the key is to rein in the trade deficit before enacting big spending, so the US economy benefits fully from it. Otherwise it’s like turning on the heat with all the windows open.

Yeah, Japan is a wonder to behold, and certainly shows that you can run up that debt so long as everyone's OK with it. There's a reason that betting against Japanese bonds is called the Widow Maker.

I'm just saying that high debt to GDP isn't a great situation to put yourself in as a country. Japan has benefited - if you can call it that - by decades of deflationary pressure pushing down rates. If that ever turns around, they'll be a jam.

But, yes, the U.S. presumably has a lot of room to run with its debt. Just not sure that it should.

Also, I'd agree that spending billions and billions on infrastructure just to watch that money go overseas one way or the other doesn't do much.

Trump also reached out to homos and trannies. Not exactly in celebratory way but as people who can wee-wee at Trump Tower and whom he will defend from Muslims.

This actually makes the Dems angry because their most sacred faith of the hour has lost its luster.
The Homo bomb nas bee defused.

Progs via media made homo stuff holy and fooled people into believing cons will round up homos and kill them. As with KKKrage at Oberlin, it fills proggies with adrenaline and righteousness.

But Trump killed two birds with stone.

1. He made homo agenda into a boring issue since he made a banal statement about how Jenner can wee-wee at Trump Tower. Wanna wee-wee? wee-wee.

2. He showed that the Deplorables stuck with him despite his homo stance.

So, homo agenda lost by winning. The homo magic for progs was its crusade aspect, a religious movement against the forces of darkness who would feed homos to the lions.

But Trump and his followers were like, "okay, wee wee at Trump Tower."

It's hard to play martyr against that.

If anything, Trump pivoted the homo-martyr issue to argue that the main threat to homos came from the immigrant community from nations that toss homos off roofs.

Anti-Trump protesters still claim that Trump means to 'kill gays', but their real rage is that Trump has defused the 'gay bomb' by halfway endorsing it. Giving it an okay without howling at the moon about it.

“Anti-Trump protesters still claim that Trump means to ‘kill gays’,”

So Donald J. Trump who is an Agnostic not a very religious man wants to murder all of the Gays. But Keith Ellison who is a hardcore devout Muslim doesn’t want to murder all of the Gays.

Muslims are more tolerant of Homosexuality than Agnostics are. Omar Mateen was an Agnostic just like Donald J. Trump.

Clinton won the inner NYC suburban counties of Westchester, Rockland and Nassau, while Trump took the outer ring counties of Orange, Duchess and Suffolk, in addition to Staten Island. Clinton picked up most of the suburban counties in New Jersey, Trump’s nearest wins were in Morris and Monmouth counties.

Regarding the Trump = Rockefeller analogy, hopefully he will not meet the same shameful end as Rockefeller.

Most of the counties between NYC and Albany consist of a reddish local (i.e., born there) population of service workers (auto mechanics, building contractors, government employees), with an overlaid bluish refugee (i.e., not born there--mostly from metro-NYC) population of aging hipsters, superannuated hippies, wealthy bobos, NYC careerists retired to their country homes, etc. Further north = more of the former, less of the latter.

It makes for an inversion of the stereotypical D/R divide. The blue collar underclass are the Repubs and the wealthy, idle overclass are the Dems.

You can see why upstate hearkened to the Trumpening.

“It makes for an inversion of the stereotypical D/R divide. The blue collar underclass are the Repubs and the wealthy, idle overclass are the Dems.”

Why do you automatically associate all blue collar people with the welfare underclass? Are carpenters and plumbers for example living in poverty? They actually make pretty good middle class money.

Polls have shown that the majority of underclass voters voted for Crooked Hillary over Donald J. Trump, those who’s incomes meet the definition of living below the poverty line.

Off topic, this Chinese American woman named Kristina Wong said she was referred to as a White woman by the locals in Uganda when she traveled there.http://www.wweek.com/arts/2016/10/19/kristina-wongs-one-woman-show-takes-on-internet-activists-and-white-privilege/

It makes me wonder what percentage of The U.S population would be seen as White by Ugandan standards and African standards in general.

“It makes me wonder what percentage of The U.S population would be seen as White by Ugandan standards and African standards in general.”

A majority of Hispanics for sure, and a non-inconsequential minority of blacks.

As a New Yorker, I would like to see the state adopt the Maine/Nebraska method of electoral college vote-tallying. Also, it would really help if the Republican Party didn't just write off whole electoral districts. In my district there was no opposition candidate - at all - to the Democratic party's candidates for the House or the State Senate.

Not gonna happen as it would benefit Republicans. Mitt Romney would have been elected with such a system in 2012.

The only way to die young in that family is to be eaten by inhabitants of New Guinea. They are not the Kennedies.

Nelson died at 70 which is not young but not particularly old either. On the other hand, he died happy because he had a heart attack while doing the nasty with a 25 year old aide. It’s possible that he could have been saved but the girl panicked and an ambulance was not called for an hour.

H1-B visas do not have to be eliminated as there may actually be situations where a business does need some outside help unavailable in the USA at the time.

A theoretical need/benefit that is so unlikely to arise that it may not be worth the cost, uncertainty, and potential abuse that would dog the administration of such a loophole. But I would find such visas to be more tolerable if coupled with your tax idea (at higher than $40,000/year).

H1-B visas do not have to be eliminated as there may actually be situations where a business does need some outside help unavailable in the USA at the time.

No. That's an idea that needs to die. This is a big, big country with a huge skilled population that outnumbers India's or China's.

That pernicious idea was the thin edge of the wedge and is kept alive to justify undercutting the U.S. market for labor by hiring foreigners at wages below those any American would accept. It's just a way of bringing the overseas labor market and its pricing right into our homeland. Third world prospects for Americans ensue.

Globalist plutocrats love unlimited mobility of labor. The H-1B is one way to accomplish that.

Nice analysis of Trump parallels with Nelson Rockefeller. One correction, however. While I was on the periphery of JDR III benefices, such as Asia Society, in the 1960s, I heard from associates that he was dyslexic as well. You may have missed this because he was quieter than his brothers.

Japan's debt is over 200% of GDP and it has lower interest rates than us.

Trump has room to move here. But the key is to rein in the trade deficit before enacting big spending, so the US economy benefits fully from it. Otherwise it's like turning on the heat with all the windows open.

Yeah, Japan is a wonder to behold, and certainly shows that you can run up that debt so long as everyone’s OK with it. There’s a reason that betting against Japanese bonds is called the Widow Maker.

I’m just saying that high debt to GDP isn’t a great situation to put yourself in as a country. Japan has benefited – if you can call it that – by decades of deflationary pressure pushing down rates. If that ever turns around, they’ll be a jam.

But, yes, the U.S. presumably has a lot of room to run with its debt. Just not sure that it should.

Also, I’d agree that spending billions and billions on infrastructure just to watch that money go overseas one way or the other doesn’t do much.

Ever notice how Tiny Duck is very quick off the mark? When a comment-tree starts, it's even money against the book that Tiny will already be numbered in the top 3 posts? Is Tiny a robot, bolted down at NSA headquarters? Will the new Trump Administration pull the plug on Tiny at the stroke of noon, January 20, 2017?

If Tiny starts talking about the "The Free Coinage of Silver" and William Jennings Bryan, you'll know for sure that his programmer has mistakenly set his internal clock back to 1896!

His AI is not very convincing. It keeps bringing up the same themes – that white people will be replaced, killed, imprisoned, forced to pay reparations, bear colored children, etc. You would think that after the election that they would have updated his program to say something fresh but it doesn’t seem to have been updated at all. Release 2.0 is well overdue.

If TD really is human, it’s pretty pathetic that he harps on the same themes so much that he can be mistaken for a bot. Then again, Paul Krugman is no different.

And how about Tom "Fraudman" Friedman of the Carlos Slim blog. There is a Tom Friedman opinion column generator online. All you have to is type in a few key words and the software spits out an entire Friedman column that cannot be distinguished from an original!

This from the gloater-in-chief prior to the election, so smugly assuring us Hillary would win and destroy us. How many times did we see outright genocidal hate from you? Practically every comment from you was either commentary gloating that white women will breed away whiteness with black men, commentary cheering that white men are going to die out, or commentary that whites were soon to be rounded up and persecuted.

And now that you've lost, you're upset that others are celebrating their victory (and not even saying hate speech as you did).

Frankly, if you are a gay as you've recently claimed, if you had any sense at all you would be down on your knees thanking Trump for using the Sailer Strategy and getting white America to save you from your own foolish missteps- Hillary would've cheerfully imported millions of anti-gay Muslims. If you need to see the wisdom of that idea, take a look at Europe. Or Orlando.

The only thing that keeps current moslems in America from throwing el patito minuscolo off the roof of a tall building is the dreaded “white supremacy”!

Can Congress put in a requirement that contractors and subcontractors hire legal workers only (and not illegal aliens)? Where I am, I see widespread use by the federal and local governments of illegal aliens for construction, maintenance, and landscaping work. Shouldn't there be a law against this?

Yes, Congress can do that very simply by passing the E-Verify law that Speaker Paul Ryan hates so much.

Can Congress put in a requirement that contractors and subcontractors hire legal workers only (and not illegal aliens)? Where I am, I see widespread use by the federal and local governments of illegal aliens for construction, maintenance, and landscaping work. Shouldn't there be a law against this?

>>Shouldn’t there be a law against this?

There is a law against this, and it has been in effect since 1986. It’s just not enforced.

Seriously, daily mail is a great site if you zoom in enough to block out the right column trash. Telling the story through photos is very powerful and yet no american news site will follow their lead.......

You can tell what a racist, gay hater and anti-Semite Trump is by all the people who are visiting him – Floyd Mayweather, Steve Mnuchin, Boris Epshteyn, Pete Thiel, etc.

I don’t know if Trump is dyslexic but clearly reading is less important to him than conversation and television.

It was a surprise to me when I realised that Trump is not in fact terribly articulate. He can do the big picture bullet points well - or big persuasion hooks? - but he sometimes trips over himself if he attempts to juggle two or three thoughts at the same time.

So he badly mishandled the gold star sharia-supporting parents who a better rhetorician could have used against the Dems. Or he could have just shut up.

Socrates disagreed but I think a measure deep reading is necessary to be truly articulate - and not just, say, cunning in a souk salesman sort of way (this is not aimed at Trump).

This may not matter, indeed his bold talk can be creative in a taboo-breaking way, but it would seem to be important that he is aware of his limitations.

George W. Bush and Barack Obama were both verbal nincompoops without a teleprompter to guide them.

Yeah, what's up with that? Not only does nothing set it off, nobody even cares about inflation anymore

Uh oh.

>>Yeah, what’s up with that? Not only does nothing set it off, nobody even cares about inflation anymore

Uh oh.<<

We have tons of inflation, it is just going into assets, not to wages. Quantitative easing: Fed lends easy money to banks, or better yet, buys up worthless assets from the banks. Instead of finding creative ways to get this easy money into the hands of responsible citizens for productive use, the banks speculate on stocks, commodities, bonds, land, etc.. JP Morgan has a fleet of loaded tankers floating around the world waiting for the right time to unload their cargo. Hedge funds bought up massive amounts of cheap housing whose owners defaulted on their mortgages. We could go on. Is that what financial institutions are supposed to do? I don't think so. All bad things come to a bad end. This will come to a bad end someday too.

Chances are high that Trump read a lot as a child and young man. I don't think you get into or through Wharton without being willing to read. He read Adios America not so long ago.

But now? He knows what he's doing. This should be the mentoring phase of his career, but it probably includes implementation. In any case, he knows what he's doing now. He doesn’t need to read for the most part aside from paperwork.

The guy who ghost wrote The Art of the Deal (and who was a very typical New York liberal type doing everything he could to help Hillary so you have to take what he said with a grain of salt) said that Trump had a very short attention span. His parents also sent him to military academy which is something you do with kids who have problems staying disciplined on their own. I could see Trump being the kind of guy who would prefer reading the Cliff Notes instead of reading the whole long novel.

Reading can be an extremely enjoyable hobby for those of who do it, and a good way to downshift before bed, but the benefits of it otherwise are overrated. George W. Bush was a big reader, particularly of history. I don't think it made him a better president.

Schumer is a really bright guy and it's not completely surprising that he was able to sell magic beans to a dim bulb like Little Marco. But Trump is Big League - I really can't imagine anyone BS'ing the BS'er. Also I think if Trump was looking for ways to make the most money, then spending the last year and a half on the campaign trail was really not the best use of his time. So I see little chance of your worst case scenario.

We probably won't find out who Trump's S. Ct. nominee will be for a while, but pretty soon we will know of his cabinet choices. I expect to see a blend of fairly right wing (Bannon) and slightly right mainstream Republican figures (Priebus) but not a lot of RINOs in the top ranks. Further down in the ranks he may have to dip a little further because the right wing talent just isn't there. But for the S. Ct. he only has to pick 1 guy for now so I think he will get someone who is solidly right while at the same time well qualified. Someone with enough of a track record that it would be out of character for them to drift into the left wing of the court. Someone who will be a suitable successor to Scalia. I don't think he will even get extraordinary pushback from the Dems in the Senate on such a nominee because he will be taking the Scalia seat and they have no excuse to say that he is pushing the court to the right - he will (at best since Scalia was so rock solid) at most be putting it back to where it was when Scalia died. Not that Dems won't moan - from now on they are going to moan about EVERYTHING that Trump does. However, I can see the panic that will occur if say Ginsburg is replaced by another solid right winger - that's when they will start punching below the belt and dig up that the nominee once jaywalked when he was 12 or wolf whistled at a girl or something.

His AI is not very convincing. It keeps bringing up the same themes - that white people will be replaced, killed, imprisoned, forced to pay reparations, bear colored children, etc. You would think that after the election that they would have updated his program to say something fresh but it doesn't seem to have been updated at all. Release 2.0 is well overdue.

If TD really is human, it's pretty pathetic that he harps on the same themes so much that he can be mistaken for a bot. Then again, Paul Krugman is no different.

TD’s ability to keep trolling is pretty amazing, particularly since his cause just got BTFO.

Glenn Beck is now labeling himself as “woke Glenn Beck”, dressing in a spiffy new style, who is now aware of the dangerous racism of the Alt Right. Or whatever.

Apparently to these brilliant minds, all the ‘Kill Whitey’ grafitti, riots and beatings must mean white people still must learn to control their racism. Why just the other day, a white kindergartner was seen eating a brown M&M first.

At least he’s still good for a laugh. I thought he’d never top rolling his face in Cheetos.

His AI is not very convincing. It keeps bringing up the same themes - that white people will be replaced, killed, imprisoned, forced to pay reparations, bear colored children, etc. You would think that after the election that they would have updated his program to say something fresh but it doesn't seem to have been updated at all. Release 2.0 is well overdue.

If TD really is human, it's pretty pathetic that he harps on the same themes so much that he can be mistaken for a bot. Then again, Paul Krugman is no different.

And how about Tom “Fraudman” Friedman of the Carlos Slim blog. There is a Tom Friedman opinion column generator online. All you have to is type in a few key words and the software spits out an entire Friedman column that cannot be distinguished from an original!

Optimistically, Trump will peel off the few remaining sane Democrats to his causes.

Pessimistically: Schumer convinces Trump to nominate one or two "moderates" (who will soon drift left) to the Supreme Court, then resign, in return for some yuge favors to his business interests.

Schumer is a really bright guy and it’s not completely surprising that he was able to sell magic beans to a dim bulb like Little Marco. But Trump is Big League – I really can’t imagine anyone BS’ing the BS’er. Also I think if Trump was looking for ways to make the most money, then spending the last year and a half on the campaign trail was really not the best use of his time. So I see little chance of your worst case scenario.

We probably won’t find out who Trump’s S. Ct. nominee will be for a while, but pretty soon we will know of his cabinet choices. I expect to see a blend of fairly right wing (Bannon) and slightly right mainstream Republican figures (Priebus) but not a lot of RINOs in the top ranks. Further down in the ranks he may have to dip a little further because the right wing talent just isn’t there. But for the S. Ct. he only has to pick 1 guy for now so I think he will get someone who is solidly right while at the same time well qualified. Someone with enough of a track record that it would be out of character for them to drift into the left wing of the court. Someone who will be a suitable successor to Scalia. I don’t think he will even get extraordinary pushback from the Dems in the Senate on such a nominee because he will be taking the Scalia seat and they have no excuse to say that he is pushing the court to the right – he will (at best since Scalia was so rock solid) at most be putting it back to where it was when Scalia died. Not that Dems won’t moan – from now on they are going to moan about EVERYTHING that Trump does. However, I can see the panic that will occur if say Ginsburg is replaced by another solid right winger – that’s when they will start punching below the belt and dig up that the nominee once jaywalked when he was 12 or wolf whistled at a girl or something.

Chances are high that Trump read a lot as a child and young man. I don't think you get into or through Wharton without being willing to read. He read Adios America not so long ago.

But now? He knows what he's doing. This should be the mentoring phase of his career, but it probably includes implementation. In any case, he knows what he's doing now. He doesn’t need to read for the most part aside from paperwork.

Trump’s ghostwriter for Art of the Deal, Tony Schwartz, said this: “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment.

Again, take it with a grain of salt but I don’t think that Trump is some sort of secret intellectual who is just hiding it real well. Then again, if you look at the people who ARE supposed to be our public intellectuals, their ideas mostly stink and they have been leading us down blind alleys and into dead ends for the last century or more, with plenty of dead in their wake.

Too bad Trump didn't stick his nose in books more often: he might have made something of himself, and been as well-informed and wise as a college professor.

For most book-lovers, reading is a substitute for thinking.

A few mass murderer dictators like Lenin, Stalin and Hitler were bookworms. I don’t know much about Mao, but I read his calligraphy skills were considered great. I read somewhere a Taiwanese TV made a show or documentary or something about China, with the title being simply “China”, and they chose a really nice calligraphy of the word as the head title. Later they had to change it when it was found out that it was a calligraphy by Mao…

Note that those guys were living in the pre-TV age where reading was one of the primary forms of leisure and entertainment. Who knows if they'd be voracious readers today. Maybe they'd watch lots of TV instead.

In the 70's mom read me an essay by Nelson Rockefeller on his childhood learning disability. As a dyslexic myself, it gave me a lot of encouragement. A sort of Ugly Duckling story for retards.

The Latin for "read" means to "pick out" suggesting that those who could read a few thousand years ago did so with some considerable effort.

There are very few books around Trump's apartment. There are a few current coffee table books and one case of nice looking leather bound sets, likely never touched unless someone dusts them.

Trump’s a doer and a leader, not the wonky guy, as he’s always shown and never hidden. But let’s never assume anything with him.

As Steve (or someone else, can’t remember) pointed out after reading The Art of Deal, Trump makes it seem like a real estate magnate’s job is to make everyone else think everyone else is on board—the zoning board, the lenders, the contractors, the unions, the neighborhood groups, the future tenants, etc.—so balancing them all out is largely a schmooze-and-finesse job, requiring a lot of conversations, bravado, and chutzpah. Not a lot of time for wonky reading, but his instincts are honed extremely well.

He his staff to draw up the(wonky) deals, and then negotiates the big (and small) points with the other guys. So he’s a big picture guy—the schmoozing, the handholding, the negotiating—and relies on his ability to hire the right people to make sure the details are strong for him, as well as to inform him what he needs to be negotiating for.

Then again, Trump is famous for seeming to be impulsive, unpredictable, and to hide what he will do, while all the while having solid, long-term plans and options always open (he registered Make America Great Again as a trademark in friggin’ 2012 people; this man is not some man-child who just got up last year and ran for president on a whim; he planned this out years in advance).

So Trump may actually be a pretty, well-read wonky dude, but is hiding it from the public to give himself an edge–if your opponent think you’re stupid, they’re likely to make a very obvious mistake you can pounce on (a classic Sun Tzu Art of War technique). Just look at how, despite 40 years of real estate brilliance and celebrity and TV Show hit making, he got the entire Republican AND Democrat party AND the media to think he’s a big dumb blowhard who has no idea what he’s doing or saying from one minute to the next. He got Hillary Clinton to consistently fall into his easy traps despite her 40 years of backstabbing political life, all by playing dumb.

Crazy like a fox. Like I said, it could be Trump doesn’t read that much, or it could be that he’s hiding it from the world. When the Trump Library is built (of solid gold, at the top of Trump Tower, Manhattan), perhaps we will find out.

Just look at how, despite 40 years of real estate brilliance and celebrity and TV Show hit making, he got the entire Republican AND Democrat party AND the media to think he’s a big dumb blowhard who has no idea what he’s doing or saying from one minute to the next.

When Donald Trump first appeared on the national (but mostly New York) scene in the early 1980s, that was exactly the reaction of the New York elites. Here was a guy, a slumlord's son in his late 30's, whose manner and affect were distinctly (to them) low to mid-IQ, his business was the very down market Mafia-ridden construction business, and yet, everybody was paying attention to him. He was on the cover of Newsweek! They responded by shutting him out of the circles of the glitterati in Manhattan-the art show openings and the boards of the good works charities and hoped he'd go away. Graydon Carter's "short-fingered vulgarian" column in Vanity Fair was of a piece with that effort.

But he never went away, and bounced back repeatedly when he failed. A comeback kid, more than Bill Clinton ever was.

I've read that, publicly, Eisenhower affected an unintelligent personality where as in private he was intelligent and effective. The purpose was to seem like a man of the people. Trump may be similar, I'm not sure.

The guy who ghost wrote The Art of the Deal (and who was a very typical New York liberal type doing everything he could to help Hillary so you have to take what he said with a grain of salt) said that Trump had a very short attention span. His parents also sent him to military academy which is something you do with kids who have problems staying disciplined on their own. I could see Trump being the kind of guy who would prefer reading the Cliff Notes instead of reading the whole long novel.

Reading can be an extremely enjoyable hobby for those of who do it, and a good way to downshift before bed, but the benefits of it otherwise are overrated. George W. Bush was a big reader, particularly of history. I don’t think it made him a better president.

Yes. I'm beginning to admire people who actually do things. You know, real accomplishments, real projects. I think the impractical dreamers among us do lots of reading and thinking but they don't make or fix or improve or design or cleanup anything.

Somewhere along the line we forgot that talking about music isn't the same as practicing the piano for hours. Discussing architecture isn't going to get a building erected. Arguing over a theory of sociology doesn't make a new baby or a settle a marriage.

The Democrats are at risk of losing a major amount of Senate seats in 2018, should Trump maintain (or likely exceed) his current popularity levels. The crazier the SJW reaction gets, the harsher the backlash will be.

A large trache of money is already availiable for a massive infrastructure program, its called telling LockMart to stuff it on the F-35 cost overruns. A failing system of public services is the true cost of our endless wars.

A failing system of public services is the true cost of our endless wars.

That is the truth.

We could probably rebuild infrastructure without much inflation by changing our foreign policies for the better.

Trump's a doer and a leader, not the wonky guy, as he's always shown and never hidden. But let's never assume anything with him.

As Steve (or someone else, can't remember) pointed out after reading The Art of Deal, Trump makes it seem like a real estate magnate's job is to make everyone else think everyone else is on board---the zoning board, the lenders, the contractors, the unions, the neighborhood groups, the future tenants, etc.---so balancing them all out is largely a schmooze-and-finesse job, requiring a lot of conversations, bravado, and chutzpah. Not a lot of time for wonky reading, but his instincts are honed extremely well.

He his staff to draw up the(wonky) deals, and then negotiates the big (and small) points with the other guys. So he's a big picture guy---the schmoozing, the handholding, the negotiating---and relies on his ability to hire the right people to make sure the details are strong for him, as well as to inform him what he needs to be negotiating for.

Then again, Trump is famous for seeming to be impulsive, unpredictable, and to hide what he will do, while all the while having solid, long-term plans and options always open (he registered Make America Great Again as a trademark in friggin' 2012 people; this man is not some man-child who just got up last year and ran for president on a whim; he planned this out years in advance).

So Trump may actually be a pretty, well-read wonky dude, but is hiding it from the public to give himself an edge--if your opponent think you're stupid, they're likely to make a very obvious mistake you can pounce on (a classic Sun Tzu Art of War technique). Just look at how, despite 40 years of real estate brilliance and celebrity and TV Show hit making, he got the entire Republican AND Democrat party AND the media to think he's a big dumb blowhard who has no idea what he's doing or saying from one minute to the next. He got Hillary Clinton to consistently fall into his easy traps despite her 40 years of backstabbing political life, all by playing dumb.

Crazy like a fox. Like I said, it could be Trump doesn't read that much, or it could be that he's hiding it from the world. When the Trump Library is built (of solid gold, at the top of Trump Tower, Manhattan), perhaps we will find out.

H1-B visas do not have to be eliminated as there may actually be situations where a business does need some outside help unavailable in the USA at the time.

However, a H1-B visa should be taxed heavily. Something like $40,000 dollars a year for each visa each year. The business requesting the visa would pay the tax.

H1-B visas do not have to be eliminated as there may actually be situations where a business does need some outside help unavailable in the USA at the time.

A theoretical need/benefit that is so unlikely to arise that it may not be worth the cost, uncertainty, and potential abuse that would dog the administration of such a loophole. But I would find such visas to be more tolerable if coupled with your tax idea (at higher than $40,000/year).

A few mass murderer dictators like Lenin, Stalin and Hitler were bookworms. I don't know much about Mao, but I read his calligraphy skills were considered great. I read somewhere a Taiwanese TV made a show or documentary or something about China, with the title being simply "China", and they chose a really nice calligraphy of the word as the head title. Later they had to change it when it was found out that it was a calligraphy by Mao...

Note that those guys were living in the pre-TV age where reading was one of the primary forms of leisure and entertainment. Who knows if they’d be voracious readers today. Maybe they’d watch lots of TV instead.

The New Deal (and still in effect) Davis-Bacon act requires Federal contractors to pay “prevailing wage” which is another name for union wages. They don’t have to use union labor but they have to pay the equivalent of union wages so there’s no advantage to hiring non-union labor.

Off topic, this Chinese American woman named Kristina Wong said she was referred to as a White woman by the locals in Uganda when she traveled there.http://www.wweek.com/arts/2016/10/19/kristina-wongs-one-woman-show-takes-on-internet-activists-and-white-privilege/

It makes me wonder what percentage of The U.S population would be seen as White by Ugandan standards and African standards in general.

Really pisses off Asians to be considered White when back in the States she inexplicably has the privilege of Blacks.

>>Yeah, what’s up with that? Not only does nothing set it off, nobody even cares about inflation anymore

Uh oh.<<

We have tons of inflation, it is just going into assets, not to wages. Quantitative easing: Fed lends easy money to banks, or better yet, buys up worthless assets from the banks. Instead of finding creative ways to get this easy money into the hands of responsible citizens for productive use, the banks speculate on stocks, commodities, bonds, land, etc.. JP Morgan has a fleet of loaded tankers floating around the world waiting for the right time to unload their cargo. Hedge funds bought up massive amounts of cheap housing whose owners defaulted on their mortgages. We could go on. Is that what financial institutions are supposed to do? I don't think so. All bad things come to a bad end. This will come to a bad end someday too.

H1-B visas do not have to be eliminated as there may actually be situations where a business does need some outside help unavailable in the USA at the time.

However, a H1-B visa should be taxed heavily. Something like $40,000 dollars a year for each visa each year. The business requesting the visa would pay the tax.

H1-B visas do not have to be eliminated as there may actually be situations where a business does need some outside help unavailable in the USA at the time.

No. That’s an idea that needs to die. This is a big, big country with a huge skilled population that outnumbers India’s or China’s.

That pernicious idea was the thin edge of the wedge and is kept alive to justify undercutting the U.S. market for labor by hiring foreigners at wages below those any American would accept. It’s just a way of bringing the overseas labor market and its pricing right into our homeland. Third world prospects for Americans ensue.

Globalist plutocrats love unlimited mobility of labor. The H-1B is one way to accomplish that.

Trump's a doer and a leader, not the wonky guy, as he's always shown and never hidden. But let's never assume anything with him.

As Steve (or someone else, can't remember) pointed out after reading The Art of Deal, Trump makes it seem like a real estate magnate's job is to make everyone else think everyone else is on board---the zoning board, the lenders, the contractors, the unions, the neighborhood groups, the future tenants, etc.---so balancing them all out is largely a schmooze-and-finesse job, requiring a lot of conversations, bravado, and chutzpah. Not a lot of time for wonky reading, but his instincts are honed extremely well.

He his staff to draw up the(wonky) deals, and then negotiates the big (and small) points with the other guys. So he's a big picture guy---the schmoozing, the handholding, the negotiating---and relies on his ability to hire the right people to make sure the details are strong for him, as well as to inform him what he needs to be negotiating for.

Then again, Trump is famous for seeming to be impulsive, unpredictable, and to hide what he will do, while all the while having solid, long-term plans and options always open (he registered Make America Great Again as a trademark in friggin' 2012 people; this man is not some man-child who just got up last year and ran for president on a whim; he planned this out years in advance).

So Trump may actually be a pretty, well-read wonky dude, but is hiding it from the public to give himself an edge--if your opponent think you're stupid, they're likely to make a very obvious mistake you can pounce on (a classic Sun Tzu Art of War technique). Just look at how, despite 40 years of real estate brilliance and celebrity and TV Show hit making, he got the entire Republican AND Democrat party AND the media to think he's a big dumb blowhard who has no idea what he's doing or saying from one minute to the next. He got Hillary Clinton to consistently fall into his easy traps despite her 40 years of backstabbing political life, all by playing dumb.

Crazy like a fox. Like I said, it could be Trump doesn't read that much, or it could be that he's hiding it from the world. When the Trump Library is built (of solid gold, at the top of Trump Tower, Manhattan), perhaps we will find out.

Just look at how, despite 40 years of real estate brilliance and celebrity and TV Show hit making, he got the entire Republican AND Democrat party AND the media to think he’s a big dumb blowhard who has no idea what he’s doing or saying from one minute to the next.

When Donald Trump first appeared on the national (but mostly New York) scene in the early 1980s, that was exactly the reaction of the New York elites. Here was a guy, a slumlord’s son in his late 30′s, whose manner and affect were distinctly (to them) low to mid-IQ, his business was the very down market Mafia-ridden construction business, and yet, everybody was paying attention to him. He was on the cover of Newsweek! They responded by shutting him out of the circles of the glitterati in Manhattan-the art show openings and the boards of the good works charities and hoped he’d go away. Graydon Carter’s “short-fingered vulgarian” column in Vanity Fair was of a piece with that effort.

But he never went away, and bounced back repeatedly when he failed. A comeback kid, more than Bill Clinton ever was.

The Democrats are at risk of losing a major amount of Senate seats in 2018, should Trump maintain (or likely exceed) his current popularity levels. The crazier the SJW reaction gets, the harsher the backlash will be.

A large trache of money is already availiable for a massive infrastructure program, its called telling LockMart to stuff it on the F-35 cost overruns. A failing system of public services is the true cost of our endless wars.

A large trache of money is already availiable for a massive infrastructure program, its called telling LockMart to stuff it on the F-35 cost overruns. A failing system of public services is the true cost of our endless wars.

Yep. Cancel the whole worthless F-35 program. You could build a lot of infrastructure with the savings. And you could build a lot of wall.

I notice the contractors usually have their name and phone number painted on the side of their trucks, while their illegal alien employees landscape the lawns and gardens up and down my street.

In Los Angeles, there are tons of "devil slavemaster" white contractor's, who routinely underbid legit contractors for construction work. We contracted for a large fence to be constructed around our property, and one contractor bid about a third off the price of all other bids. We hired him. When his crew showed up, it was made up entirely on non-english speaking mexicans. None of them, I sure, had contractor's licenses. The contractor showed up all of twice during the job, with a clipboard. It was a large job, they did okay work, but I think this really begs off the old liberal chant of "who's going to pick your grapes."

Even though I benefitted, I'd love to see Trump shut that shit down. These functional alcoholic contractors and their portable nest of illegal obedient worker drones following the silly sods around like some queen bee, undercutting US citizens trying to make a living needs to stop.

A very hard nut to crack in southern California, as I believe slavery is embedded in liberal's DNA. Getting them to stop exploiting those they feel better than is like training a dog not to piss on a tree. They'll always go back to doing it, the minute there's no pressure on them to not do it.

How the democratic party escaped being branded with the disdain accorded to Nazi's is a real puzzler to me. I can only ascribe it to their "slavery gene."

Well, traditionally liberal Upstate New York, which was largely settled by post-Puritans from New England

Maybe liberal in the classical sense. Upstate rejected disfavorite son FDR in seven statewide elections. The city threw the state’s electors to him– but in 1940 and 1944, he needed third-party votes to get them.

The Dutch set the tone. Yankees and Palatines came later, and who assimilated whom is an open question.

And, speaking of Palatines, that famous 1970 abortion law was repealed by a new legislature in 1972. But Gov Rocky flew in from an out-of-state vacation specifically to veto it.

As a New Yorker, I would like to see the state adopt the Maine/Nebraska method of electoral college vote-tallying. Also, it would really help if the Republican Party didn't just write off whole electoral districts. In my district there was no opposition candidate - at all - to the Democratic party's candidates for the House or the State Senate.

As a New Yorker, I would like to see the state adopt the Maine/Nebraska method of electoral college vote-tallying

As a New York native and lifelong student of the Electoral College, I would not want to see this at all. New York split her vote in the 1820s, and paid dearly. They adopted the unit rule forthwith, and dominated the next century.

Read Judith Best’s book. She’s at SUNY Cortland, in the heart of upstate, and knows the EC better than anyone.

Secession would be a better deal for upstaters. Maybe into three or four states. Twenty million is ridiculously ungovernable.

A few years ago, light blue states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania discussed changing their electoral votes to the congressional district method. It would help Republicans but I'm glad they didn't do it. Instead, Republicans were forced to fight to win these states and they were successful. Feels better that way.

Reading can be an extremely enjoyable hobby for those of who do it, and a good way to downshift before bed, but the benefits of it otherwise are overrated. George W. Bush was a big reader, particularly of history. I don't think it made him a better president.

Yes. I’m beginning to admire people who actually do things. You know, real accomplishments, real projects. I think the impractical dreamers among us do lots of reading and thinking but they don’t make or fix or improve or design or cleanup anything.

Somewhere along the line we forgot that talking about music isn’t the same as practicing the piano for hours. Discussing architecture isn’t going to get a building erected. Arguing over a theory of sociology doesn’t make a new baby or a settle a marriage.

Reading can be an extremely enjoyable hobby for those of who do it, and a good way to downshift before bed, but the benefits of it otherwise are overrated. George W. Bush was a big reader, particularly of history. I don't think it made him a better president.

If reading had made him a better president, I can’t imagine how bad he would have been otherwise.

I'd say Trump has much more in common with the interior north Republican political tradition of Abraham Lincoln, Ulyssess Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Senator Bob LaFollette, Senator Robert Taft, and Senator Robert Dole, than Nelson Rockefeller or any of the New England/Northeast internationalists like Lodge and Scranton (or the Bushes or Romney's).

Trump's political support is centered on the area in and behind the Appalachians over to the Rockies, not coastal New England. He was decisively rejected in all the Rockefeller Republican/Country Club Republican neighborhoods in the northeast, which went for Kasich in the primary and Clinton in the general, and he had no special draw in the southern coastal areas and was disdained in the coastal west.

He is a fusion candidate of Appalachia, the Ozarks, the Midlands, the Great Plains and the northern Midwest.

I’d say Trump has much more in common with the interior north Republican political tradition of Abraham Lincoln, Ulyssess Grant, Teddy Roosevelt

I was never enamored of Rockefeller. He was disconnected from “normal” people, and he was a mean little fucker. With Teddy, you might not even like him, but nobody can claim he didn’t solicit the response of, “yes! just cut the shit and get it done!!” in spite of all our civic training and habits.

I’m just praying I’m right, and we have a version of Teddy on our hands.

How about passing a bill that rewards citizens for whistleblowing on such contractors?

I notice the contractors usually have their name and phone number painted on the side of their trucks, while their illegal alien employees landscape the lawns and gardens up and down my street.

I notice the contractors usually have their name and phone number painted on the side of their trucks, while their illegal alien employees landscape the lawns and gardens up and down my street.

In Los Angeles, there are tons of “devil slavemaster” white contractor’s, who routinely underbid legit contractors for construction work. We contracted for a large fence to be constructed around our property, and one contractor bid about a third off the price of all other bids. We hired him. When his crew showed up, it was made up entirely on non-english speaking mexicans. None of them, I sure, had contractor’s licenses. The contractor showed up all of twice during the job, with a clipboard. It was a large job, they did okay work, but I think this really begs off the old liberal chant of “who’s going to pick your grapes.”

Even though I benefitted, I’d love to see Trump shut that shit down. These functional alcoholic contractors and their portable nest of illegal obedient worker drones following the silly sods around like some queen bee, undercutting US citizens trying to make a living needs to stop.

A very hard nut to crack in southern California, as I believe slavery is embedded in liberal’s DNA. Getting them to stop exploiting those they feel better than is like training a dog not to piss on a tree. They’ll always go back to doing it, the minute there’s no pressure on them to not do it.

How the democratic party escaped being branded with the disdain accorded to Nazi’s is a real puzzler to me. I can only ascribe it to their “slavery gene.”

Trump's a doer and a leader, not the wonky guy, as he's always shown and never hidden. But let's never assume anything with him.

As Steve (or someone else, can't remember) pointed out after reading The Art of Deal, Trump makes it seem like a real estate magnate's job is to make everyone else think everyone else is on board---the zoning board, the lenders, the contractors, the unions, the neighborhood groups, the future tenants, etc.---so balancing them all out is largely a schmooze-and-finesse job, requiring a lot of conversations, bravado, and chutzpah. Not a lot of time for wonky reading, but his instincts are honed extremely well.

He his staff to draw up the(wonky) deals, and then negotiates the big (and small) points with the other guys. So he's a big picture guy---the schmoozing, the handholding, the negotiating---and relies on his ability to hire the right people to make sure the details are strong for him, as well as to inform him what he needs to be negotiating for.

Then again, Trump is famous for seeming to be impulsive, unpredictable, and to hide what he will do, while all the while having solid, long-term plans and options always open (he registered Make America Great Again as a trademark in friggin' 2012 people; this man is not some man-child who just got up last year and ran for president on a whim; he planned this out years in advance).

So Trump may actually be a pretty, well-read wonky dude, but is hiding it from the public to give himself an edge--if your opponent think you're stupid, they're likely to make a very obvious mistake you can pounce on (a classic Sun Tzu Art of War technique). Just look at how, despite 40 years of real estate brilliance and celebrity and TV Show hit making, he got the entire Republican AND Democrat party AND the media to think he's a big dumb blowhard who has no idea what he's doing or saying from one minute to the next. He got Hillary Clinton to consistently fall into his easy traps despite her 40 years of backstabbing political life, all by playing dumb.

Crazy like a fox. Like I said, it could be Trump doesn't read that much, or it could be that he's hiding it from the world. When the Trump Library is built (of solid gold, at the top of Trump Tower, Manhattan), perhaps we will find out.

I’ve read that, publicly, Eisenhower affected an unintelligent personality where as in private he was intelligent and effective. The purpose was to seem like a man of the people. Trump may be similar, I’m not sure.

Off topic, this Chinese American woman named Kristina Wong said she was referred to as a White woman by the locals in Uganda when she traveled there.http://www.wweek.com/arts/2016/10/19/kristina-wongs-one-woman-show-takes-on-internet-activists-and-white-privilege/

It makes me wonder what percentage of The U.S population would be seen as White by Ugandan standards and African standards in general.

When I was in Brazil, I noticed that many of the people who self identified as “white” wouldn’t be considered so in the US as they had visible traces of African ancestry.

"“When I was in Brazil, I noticed that many of the people who self identified as “white” wouldn’t be considered so in the US as they had visible traces of African ancestry.”

You are mistaking self identifying as Nonblack with self identifying as White, the two obviously do not always go hand and hand together, especially in Brazil. Neymar for example said he does not see himself as Black, but it does not mean he sees himself as White either. Neymar sees himself as Mixed Race (Brown).

I’ve never met a self identified White Brazilian who phenotype wise would be seen as physically Black in The United States.

I don't know where the hell you are supposedly meeting these so-called self identifying "White" Brazilians who look like Eazy E, Dr. Dre, Mc Ren, and Ice Cube.

If White Brazilians look like N.W.A, what do self identified Black Brazilians look like? Are they so Black they make Ugandans look like Swedes?

As a New Yorker, I would like to see the state adopt the Maine/Nebraska method of electoral college vote-tallying

As a New York native and lifelong student of the Electoral College, I would not want to see this at all. New York split her vote in the 1820s, and paid dearly. They adopted the unit rule forthwith, and dominated the next century.

Read Judith Best's book. She's at SUNY Cortland, in the heart of upstate, and knows the EC better than anyone.

Secession would be a better deal for upstaters. Maybe into three or four states. Twenty million is ridiculously ungovernable.

A few years ago, light blue states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania discussed changing their electoral votes to the congressional district method. It would help Republicans but I’m glad they didn’t do it. Instead, Republicans were forced to fight to win these states and they were successful. Feels better that way.

Right now, only very Republican Nebraska and mostly Democratic Maine use the district system. I don't know what drove Nebraska to do that, but it's the only state with a unicamersl legislature, so weirdness there is not unknown.

There's an initiative called National Popular Vote that's an end run around the necessity of amending the Constitution; states agree to award their electors to the national "winner".

All the states that have signed on so far, about ten, are heavily Democratic. Let's keep it that way!

Why are Schumer and some other Northern Democrats interested in playing nice with Trump when others are raining fire and brimstone upon the President-Elect?

Because when Chucky shills for so many other forces, and simultaneously starts making sweet. unsolicited love with your gentile-inferior and heavily vaselinized brain , he prefers to look you straight in the eye.

And by doing it that way, Schumer allows his penetrating sense of historical parallelism to much more easily glide through the remaining synapses of your survival nerve :

( MUST READ for Jack D )

The Rise and Potential Fall of the Tea Party: the Fundamental Flaw in the Tea Party’s Premise and What Democrats Can Do to Exploit It

Remarks by Sen. Charles Schumer, as prepared for delivery:

“… This reaction against social and cultural changes isn’t new to us.
Edward Shils, a professor from the University of Chicago, wrote about the Temperance Movement identifying that it was about much more than abolishing liquor.

In the 1880s the U.S. was a rural country and people were on farms and small towns living a clean, God-fearing life. By 1920, America had been urbanized and diversified because of manufacturing, immigration, and so many other forces.

And the cities were a totally different way of life with slums, bars and dance clubs, emerging suburbs and country clubs.

Prohibition was not simply about abolishing alcohol; it was an attempt by rural Americans to pull their country back to a Jeffersonian agricultural ideal that was being rapidly replaced by a new cultural and economic order.

Today, we see the Tea Party doing much of the same thing. Tea Party adherents see an America that’s not reflective of themselves, and the America they have known, and they just don’t like it.

Just consider the changes in the past few decades.

Technologically, our world is absolutely unrecognizable to the world when Reagan entered the White House what some have labeled, “The Second Machine Age” – a transformation of work, leisure and life that is every bit as profound and far reaching as the Industrial Revolution.

The distribution of power is changing. Women are still under-represented but far, far better-represented in both the House and the Senate; an African-American sits in the Oval Office and more Latinos are running for office than ever before.

Mores and values are changing: marriage equality has gone from anathema to accepted in state-after-state in record time.

Yes, things have changed.

White Anglo-Saxon men are not exclusively running the country anymore. President Obama lost the white male vote 35%-62%, yet he recaptured the presidency by 5 million votes and a resounding Electoral College margin.

And more profoundly, only 1 in 10 GOP voters were non-white.

The truth is America is ever-changing and that’s a tribute to the foresight of our forefathers. They anticipated our evolution and they created a political system through which we could harness it and best put it to use.

But this fear of a changing America helps explain why a faction that was ostensibly founded on the principle of reducing the deficit and spurring free market entrepreneurial growth has had such a hold on the many who actually believe in government programs like Medicare, infrastructure building, pensions and making it easier to pay for college.

It also explains why so many on the right vehemently opposed the Senate immigration bill, a bill that actually embodies many conservative, non-governmental principals: reducing our deficit by billions, growing our economy, creating jobs and spurring new entrepreneurial activity.

In a pre-Tea Party world, the Senate immigration bill would have been welcomed by House Republicans.

However, the Tea Party rank and file know it’s a different America. It looks different; it prays different; it works different.

This is unsettling and angering to some.

So, in parts of America, the powder keg was ripe to explode, and the Tea Party elites decided to light the fuse.

Those elites recognized that people were angry and frustrated and they proffered government as the reason, the cause, of people’s frustration and anger. They proposed a simple remedy: greatly shrink or even eliminate government and your problems would vanish.

Just as the temperance movement at the turn of the last century convinced its millions of followers that if you simply got rid of alcohol, America would almost magically revert back to the American they preferred, the Tea Party elite have manipulated their millions of grassroots followers to believe the same about government at this moment in time.

Unfortunately, we Democrats really didn’t have much of an antidote to this quack medicine; we let the argument go basically unchallenged.

“When I was in Brazil, I noticed that many of the people who self identified as “white” wouldn’t be considered so in the US as they had visible traces of African ancestry.”

You are mistaking self identifying as Nonblack with self identifying as White, the two obviously do not always go hand and hand together, especially in Brazil. Neymar for example said he does not see himself as Black, but it does not mean he sees himself as White either. Neymar sees himself as Mixed Race (Brown).

I’ve never met a self identified White Brazilian who phenotype wise would be seen as physically Black in The United States.

When I was in Brazil, I noticed that many of the people who self identified as "white" wouldn't be considered so in the US as they had visible traces of African ancestry.

““When I was in Brazil, I noticed that many of the people who self identified as “white” wouldn’t be considered so in the US as they had visible traces of African ancestry.”

You are mistaking self identifying as Nonblack with self identifying as White, the two obviously do not always go hand and hand together, especially in Brazil. Neymar for example said he does not see himself as Black, but it does not mean he sees himself as White either. Neymar sees himself as Mixed Race (Brown).

I’ve never met a self identified White Brazilian who phenotype wise would be seen as physically Black in The United States.

I don’t know where the hell you are supposedly meeting these so-called self identifying “White” Brazilians who look like Eazy E, Dr. Dre, Mc Ren, and Ice Cube.

If White Brazilians look like N.W.A, what do self identified Black Brazilians look like? Are they so Black they make Ugandans look like Swedes?

A few years ago, light blue states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania discussed changing their electoral votes to the congressional district method. It would help Republicans but I'm glad they didn't do it. Instead, Republicans were forced to fight to win these states and they were successful. Feels better that way.

Right now, only very Republican Nebraska and mostly Democratic Maine use the district system. I don’t know what drove Nebraska to do that, but it’s the only state with a unicamersl legislature, so weirdness there is not unknown.

There’s an initiative called National Popular Vote that’s an end run around the necessity of amending the Constitution; states agree to award their electors to the national “winner”.

All the states that have signed on so far, about ten, are heavily Democratic. Let’s keep it that way!

'New York, which was largely settled by post-Puritans from New England'

The Dutch and the Mayflower seem to arrive about the same time, only the Dutch do not seem to nearly starve to death nor are they constantly waring with the Indians. Note the foundational myth of Dutch settlement is paying Indians for Manhattan. The Dutch surrender on good terms to the British in 1664.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_colonization_of_the_Americas

Note the foundational myth of Dutch settlement is paying Indians for Manhattan

We have inflation now. It is asset inflation, instead of wholesale price inflation. The reason is the nature of money. The Bretton Woods system made it possible for governments to print their way out of debt, but the result was high price inflation. The Louvre Accords systems makes it easy for government to maintain outlandishly high debt levels, but the result is asset inflation.

I think a better way to think about what Trump is up to is to look at it as a change in priorities. He has not said it, as far as I know, but my guess is he thinks we should have spent a trillion on roads and bridges in the US, rather than in Afghanistan or Iraq. For the cost of our campaign against the muzzies, we could have fixed entitlements, health care, the roads and built a nice wall.

Anyone who thinks price inflation is low right now isn’t paying attention. The government stats cook the books by using substitution and other tricks to mask rising prices. The real inflation rate is as much as 8 percentage points higher than the official figures: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

In any case, with the huge amount of high-powered money given to them by the Fed (Quantitative Easing, etc.), the banks are sitting on a price inflation bomb that will go off when the economy begins to move again and they start lending that money out. Hundreds of billions of dollars are now being held in reserve, not doing anything. When they are loaned out, they will expand by a factor of ten.

And remember, the loss of jobs in the U.S. is not really the result of “unfair trade practices” by the Chinese, or whatever other excuse given for more state interference in commerce. It’s really due to the massive Federal deficit. Americans buy goods made in China and elsewhere, and pay in dollars. The Chinese then need to find a place to spend those dollars. Except for buying oil and a few other commodities, holders of dollars have little choice but to spend them in the U.S.

Normally, that would mean purchasing American assets, goods, and services. The money would come back to the U.S. economy, and much of it would be invested. But the gigantic Federal deficit means that holders of dollars don’t have to take the risk of investing in U.S. ventures: They can merely put their dollars into Federal bonds. As far as our economy goes, that’s money down the toilet.

That’s why an “infrastructure” program won’t do the economy any long-term good, as long as its financed from deficits.

Remember that the inflation of the 70s was actually very good for the working and middle classes. The prices of consumer goods they produced went up, and their real wages went up, especially as their mortgage debt which was nominally fixed was being inflated away. It was bad for the professional, upper-middle, and upper classes, who don't produce but only consume consumer goods, make loans and own debt, and own real estate and financial assets. This is why the media and elites generally portray the inflation of that period has having been extremely terrible. The strategy of Reagan and Thatcher was to make cultural appeals and appeals to patriotism to the working and middle class while screwing them economically and giving them cheap imports so they wouldn't riot.

Anyone who thinks price inflation is low right now isn’t paying attention. The government stats cook the books by using substitution and other tricks to mask rising prices. The real inflation rate is about 4 percentage points higher than the official figures: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

In any case, with the huge amount of high-powered money given to them by the Fed (Quantitative Easing, etc.), the banks are sitting on a price inflation bomb that will go off when the economy begins to move again and they start lending that money out. Hundreds of billions of dollars are now being held in reserve, not doing anything. When they are loaned out, they will expand by a factor of ten.

And remember, the loss of jobs in the U.S. is not really the result of “unfair trade practices” by the Chinese, or whatever other excuse given for more state interference in commerce. It’s really due to the massive Federal deficit. Americans buy goods made in China and elsewhere, and pay in dollars. The Chinese then need to find a place to spend those dollars. Except for buying oil and a few other commodities, holders of dollars have little choice but to spend them in the U.S.

Normally, that would mean purchasing American assets, goods, and services. The money would come back to the U.S. economy, and much of it would be invested. But the gigantic Federal deficit means that holders of dollars don’t have to take the risk of investing in U.S. ventures: They can merely put their dollars into Federal bonds. As far as our economy goes, that’s money down the toilet.

That’s why an “infrastructure” program won’t do the economy any long-term good, as long as its financed from deficits.

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